Science at Cal - Rosemary Gillespie - Vagrants and Variability: Evolution on Remote Islands
Channel: ckleinastro
Date: 21/11/2012

"Remote islands have been heralded as "natural laboratories", with some spectacular cases of rapid evolution and proliferation of species. One of the most puzzling features of the high diversity of species on remote islands is that they almost certainly arose from one, or very few colonizers. How was variability regained after such genetic bottlenecks, and how did it give rise to ecological diversity?  I will be looking at organisms, in particular spiders and other invertebrates, that have naturally (before humans) colonized the world's most remote locales, and will discuss patterns of colonization and how the organisms changed when they reached these islands. Which groups have proliferated, how predictable is that, and to what extent do the same forms evolve repeatedly during the course of diversification? I will also consider how patterns of colonization to these islands have been altered with the arrival of humans and consider why these areas have come to be known as hotspots of extinction. I will speculate as to how we might expect biodiversity on these island hotspots to change as we go into the future."

Rosemary Gillespie is Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also Professor and holds the Schlinger Chair in Systematics. She was born and educated in Scotland, receiving her B.Sc. in Zoology from Edinburgh University in 1980. She came to the U.S. to conduct graduate work on the behavioral ecology of spiders at the University of Tennessee. After her PhD she spent several months at the University of South in Tennessee, and then started work at the University of Hawaii in 1987, initially as a postdoc, and in 1992 joined the faculty as Assistant Professor in Zoology and Researcher in the Hawaiian Evolutionary Biology program. Since her PhD, Gillespie's research has focused on patterns of diversification and adaptive radiation among lineages of spiders in the Hawaiian Islands. She joined the faculty at the University of California in Berkeley in 1999, where she continues her research focus on the islands of the Pacific, which serve as microcosms for studying how biodiversity forms and goes extinct. Her research has expanded geographically to include the islands of southern Oceania and the Indian Ocean. She is currently President-elect of the International Biogeography Society, Past-President of the American Arachnological Society, and a Trustee and Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.