Dolph Schluter | |
---|---|
Born | |
Citizenship | Canadian |
Alma mater | |
Awards | Darwin–Wallace Medal (2014) Darwin Medal (2021) Crafoord Prize (2023) |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of British Columbia |
Thesis | Diets, distributions and morphology of galapagos ground finches: the importance of food supply and interspecific competition. (1983) |
Doctoral advisor | Peter Grant |
Dolph Schluter FRS FRSC OBC (born May 22, 1955) is a Canadian professor of Evolutionary Biology and a Canada Research Chair in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. [1] Schluter is a major researcher in adaptive radiation and currently studies speciation in the three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus. [2]
Schluter received his Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Guelph in 1977, and his Doctor of Philosophy in Zoology from the University of Michigan in 1983, both in Ecology and Evolution.
Schluter's early research was done on the evolutionary ecology and morphology of Darwin's finches, and was featured in the popular science book the Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. [3] Schluter is the author of The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation, 2000, Oxford University Press, and The Analysis of Biological Data, 2009 (and 2015), with Michael Whitlock, and an editor with Robert E. Ricklefs of Species Diversity in Ecological Communities: Historical and Geographical Perspectives, 1993, Chicago University Press.
His 2023 Crafoord Prize citation stated "This year’s Crafoord Laureate in biosciences has demonstrated that Darwin’s theories about natural selection are true in practice. Using revolutionary studies of finches and sticklebacks, Dolph Schluter, University of British Columbia, Canada, has provided us with knowledge of how species arise.
In 1999, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. [4] In 2001, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. [5] In 2017, he was elected as a Foreign Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences. [6] Schluter was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia in 2021. [7] In 2023, Schluter was awarded the Crafoord Prize [8] [9] for "revolutionary studies of finches and sticklebacks [which have] provided us with knowledge of how species arise." [10]
In evolutionary biology, adaptive radiation is a process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environment makes new resources available, alters biotic interactions or opens new environmental niches. Starting with a single ancestor, this process results in the speciation and phenotypic adaptation of an array of species exhibiting different morphological and physiological traits. The prototypical example of adaptive radiation is finch speciation on the Galapagos, but examples are known from around the world.
Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within lineages. Charles Darwin was the first to describe the role of natural selection in speciation in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. He also identified sexual selection as a likely mechanism, but found it problematic.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (ISBN 0-679-40003-6) is a 1994 nonfiction book about evolutionary biology, written by Jonathan Weiner. It won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In 2014, a substantially unchanged 20th-anniversary edition e-book was issued with a preface by the author.
The Crafoord Prize is an annual science prize established in 1980 by Holger Crafoord, a Swedish industrialist, and his wife Anna-Greta Crafoord following a donation to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is awarded jointly by the Academy and the Crafoord Foundation in Lund, with the former selecting the laureates. The Prize is awarded in four categories: mathematics and astronomy, geosciences, biosciences and polyarthritis, the latter because Holger suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis in his later years.
The three-spined stickleback is a fish native to most inland and coastal waters north of 30°N. It has long been a subject of scientific study for many reasons. It shows great morphological variation throughout its range, ideal for questions about evolution and population genetics. Many populations are anadromous and very tolerant of changes in salinity, a subject of interest to physiologists. It displays elaborate breeding behavior and it can be social making it a popular subject of inquiry in fish ethology and behavioral ecology. Its antipredator adaptations, host-parasite interactions, sensory physiology, reproductive physiology, and endocrinology have also been much studied. Facilitating these studies is the fact that the three-spined stickleback is easy to find in nature and easy to keep in aquaria.
Peter Raymond Grant and Barbara Rosemary Grant are a British married couple who are evolutionary biologists at Princeton University. Each currently holds the position of emeritus professor. They are known for their work with Darwin's finches on Daphne Major, one of the Galápagos Islands. Since 1973, the Grants have spent six months of every year capturing, tagging, and taking blood samples from finches on the island. They have worked to show that natural selection can be seen within a single lifetime, or even within a couple of years. Charles Darwin originally thought that natural selection was a long, drawn out process but the Grants have shown that these changes in populations can happen very quickly.
Character displacement is the phenomenon where differences among similar species whose distributions overlap geographically are accentuated in regions where the species co-occur, but are minimized or lost where the species' distributions do not overlap. This pattern results from evolutionary change driven by biological competition among species for a limited resource. The rationale for character displacement stems from the competitive exclusion principle, also called Gause's Law, which contends that to coexist in a stable environment two competing species must differ in their respective ecological niche; without differentiation, one species will eliminate or exclude the other through competition.
David Quammen is an American writer focusing on science, nature, and travel. He is the author of fifteen books. Quammen's articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals. He is also a science communicator.
Sallie Watson "Penny" Chisholm is an American biological oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an expert in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes. Her research focuses particularly on the most abundant marine phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus, that she discovered in the 1980s with Rob Olson and other collaborators. She has a TED talk about their discovery and importance called "The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet".
Loren H. Rieseberg is a Canadian-American botanist.
Wayne Paul Maddison, is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Biodiversity at the departments of zoology and botany at the University of British Columbia, and the Director of the Spencer Entomological Collection at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum.
Sarah Perin Otto is a theoretical biologist, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution, and is currently a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. From 2008-2016, she was the director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Otto was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2015 the American Society of Naturalists gave her the Sewall Wright Award for fundamental contributions to the unification of biology. In 2021, she was awarded the Darwin–Wallace Medal for contributing major advances to the mathematical theory of evolution.
Leticia Avilés is an Ecuadoran evolutionary biologist and ecologist who studies the evolution of social behavior and the evolution of life history traits in metapopulations. Her methods include a combination of theory and empirical work, the latter using social spiders as a model system. Her research on these organisms has addressed questions such as why some spiders live in groups, why do they exhibit highly female-biased sex ratios, and why have they evolved a system where individuals remain in the natal nest to mate from generation to generation.
Judith (Judy) H. Myers is a Canadian-American ecologist. In 2014, she was elected president of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and served in that role until 2016. Professor Myers is well known for her decades-long research into plant-animal-microbe interactions, including insect pest outbreaks, viral pathogens of insects, and pioneering work on biological control of insects and plants, particularly invasive species. Throughout her career she has advocated strongly for both the public understanding of science and for increasing the number of women in the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
The UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF) is a research unit at the University of British Columbia (UBC) that was formed in 2015 by incorporating members from the former UBC Fisheries Centre, as well as a subset of researchers that are conducting marine related research at UBC. The IOF developed its own graduate program, which welcomed its first cohort of graduate students in September 2019. In addition to students of its OCF program, members are also drawn from other graduate programs at UBC, primarily from the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, the Departments of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Zoology, Geography, and Botany, and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. The UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries brings together a community of Canadian and international experts in ocean and freshwater species, systems, economics, and issues to provide new insights into how global marine systems function, and the impacts of human activity on those systems. It is working towards a world in which the oceans are healthy and their resources are used sustainably and equitably. IOF is located at The University of British Columbia, and promotes multidisciplinary study of aquatic ecosystems and broad-based collaboration with researchers, educators, maritime communities, government, NGOs, and other partners.
Jonathan B. Losos is an American evolutionary biologist, herpetologist and ailurologist.
Patricia M. Schulte is a Canadian zoologist who is a Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Her research considers physiology, genomics and population genetics. Schulte is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the former President of the Canadian Society of Zoologists.
Judith Elizabeth Mank is an American-British-Canadian zoologist who is a Canada 150 Chair at the University of British Columbia. She studies how evolution produces variation in animals. She is known for her studies of sex chromosomes and the genetic basis of sexual dimorphism. Her research has focused on various animals to study how sexual selection influences gene expression and genomic architecture.
In biology, parallel speciation is a type of speciation where there is repeated evolution of reproductively isolating traits via the same mechanisms occurring between separate yet closely related species inhabiting different environments. This leads to a circumstance where independently evolved lineages have developed reproductive isolation from their ancestral lineage, but not from other independent lineages that inhabit similar environments. In order for parallel speciation to be confirmed, there is a set of three requirements that has been established that must be met: there must be phylogenetic independence between the separate populations inhabiting similar environments to ensure that the traits responsible for reproductive isolation evolved separately, there must be reproductive isolation not only between the ancestral population and the descendent population, but also between descendent populations that inhabit dissimilar environments, and descendent populations that inhabit similar environments must not be reproductively isolated from one another. To determine if natural selection specifically is the cause of parallel speciation, a fourth requirement has been established that includes identifying and testing an adaptive mechanism, which eliminates the possibility of a genetic factor such as polyploidy being the responsible agent.
Professor Amy Angert is a population ecologist and evolutionary ecologist, working in the Botany and Zoology departments and Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Her research is known for pioneering experimental approaches to study species geographic distributions.