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College of Natural Sciences, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai‘i  96822

Speciation

Understanding the geographic scale at which new species arise in the sea has challenged marine biogeographers for well over a century, and our lab has been investigating the geographic circumstances of speciation in several different systems: continuously-distributed rocky-shore faunas of the north Pacific, sister-species pairs currently separated by the Isthmus of Panama, and anti-tropical species in the eastern Pacific.

In Hawai’i, our lab has started a comparative study of variation in gamete recognition proteins and fertilization success among populations of several species of benthic marine invertebrates.  Many marine species free-spawn by releasing their gametes into the water column such that species-specific mate-recognitions systems function largely through interactions between sperm and egg.  These types of systems provide a useful model for understanding the molecular changes responsible for causing the evolution of reproductive isolation.