Richard Strauss

Research Interests

Myprimary research program concerns the evolution of patterns of skeletaldevelopment within the livebearing fishes and in the zebrafish. Recentresults have shown that interspecific differences in adult morphologyare largely a function of the sequences and timing of ossification ofparticular bony elements. Weve also shown larval and adult growthpatterns to be decoupled and to vary independently among species,facilitating the ecological and phenotypic convergence of distantlyrelated species. Two methodological themes connect this research toother related problems that are studied in my laboratory: quantitativemorphology (morphometrics), and phylogenetic systematics, the study ofevolutionary relationships among species. Such studies have includedthe morphological structuring of fish communities, the relationshipbetween genetic variability and morphological variability, theassessment of "physiological age" in fishes, and the evolution of wingform in butterflies and other insects.

Selected Publications

• Strauss, R.E. and M.N. Atanassov. 2006. Determining best subsets ofspecimens and characters in the presence of large amounts of missingdata. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 88:309–328.
• Strauss, R.E., M.N. Atanassov, and J. Alves de Oliveira. 2003.Evaluation of the principal-component and expectation-maximizationmethods for estimating missing data in morphometric studies. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 23:284–296.
• Strauss, R.E. 2001. Cluster analysis and the identification of aggregations. Animal Behaviour 61:481-488.
• Strauss, R.E. 1999. Brain-tissue accumulation of fluorescent agepigments in four poeciliid fishes (Cyprinodontiformes) and theestimation of biological age. Growth, Development and Aging 64:149-168.
• Strauss, R.E. 1994. Identification of Africanized honeybees via nonlinear multilayer perceptrons. Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks 5: 3261–3264.
• Strauss, R.E. 1993. The study of allometry since Huxley. Introductory essay for the re-publication of: Problems of Relative Growth, J.S. Huxley (1932), pp. 47-75. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Bookstein, F.L., B. Chernoff, R.L. Elder, J.M. Humphries, G.R. Smith, and R.E. Strauss. 1985. Morphometrics in Evolutionary Biology: the Geometry of Size and Shape Change. Special Publication No.15, Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. 277 pp.