Biologists have long been asking what produces the diversity of animal coloration that we see in the natural world. In aposematic species, color and pattern is directly tied to survival and thus understanding the origin of the phenotype is important. Counterintuitively, phenotypes in aposematic species are surprisingly diverse, both within and between populations. In order to better understand this diversity, we examined gene expression in the skin during development in four different color morphs of the aposematic poison frog Ranitomeya imitator. In addition to overall differences in expression, we looked at a suite of a priori color-related genes, and identified both the pattern of expression in these genes over time as well as differences between these morphs.
Results/Conclusions
We found that classical pattern element genes such as ptch2 and mc1r are important and experience diverse gene expression patterns over time. Further, we found differences in agouti between color morphs and color types. Unsurprisingly, keratin-related genes were also differentially expressed over time and between populations.