Dec. 27, 2001 December 20, 2001 – Although the threespine
stickleback fish has been celebrated on the currency of the
Netherlands and been a star of a pioneering 1928 French
documentary film, the fish has found its most receptive audience
with biologists, who have been studying it for more than 100
years. In what may be its most important role yet, the
stickleback is being used as a model by researchers at the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) at Stanford University to
track the genetic changes that define a species, a puzzle that
until now could not be tested experimentally in vertebrate
animals. In the December 20, 2001, issue of the journal Nature,
HHMI investigator David M. Kingsley, HHMI associate Catherine L.
Peichel and their colleagues at Stanford, the University of
Wisconsin, Eau Claire, and the University of British Columbia,
report the creation of a genetic map of the fish that will make
it possible for Kingsley’s lab and others to tie behavioral,
ecological, morphological and physiological di