Arne Mooers Professor of Biodiversity Department of Biological Sciences Simon Fraser University Office, B8242: 778-782-3979 Fax: 778-782-3496 Lab, B9227: 778-782-4649 e-mail: amooers@sfu.ca

On the click-through front, there is the endangered species science and policy site Scientists for Species.

You can also go straight to my intellectual homes:
fab*-lab for organic evolution
IRMACS Center for Interdisciplinary Research
Human Evolutionary Studies Programme at SFU
Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution

This spring (2013) we are running a public lecture series titled "Seven Billion and You". The website is here. It is meant to be provocative but fun in a deadly serious sort of way.

We recently (Nov. 15, 2012) had a study published (in Nature) called The global diversity of birds in space and time. The Nature news story is here and the local media story is here. The trees can be accessed here, and there is a pretty cool searchable representative tree on the OneZoom site here.

The media got exercised (in mid-June, 2012) by a 22-authored review paper that I was honoured to be part of, on Global State Shifts . This is me talking about it on Radio Canada International's The Link programme, but this (cartoon from the Vancouver Sun) actually says it all.

Another great place is the EDGE of existence site, an endeavour we are trying to contribute to.

Back in Dec. 2011 I moderated an interesting think tank on disease ecology of pacific salmon. The fruits of our labours are on the SFU Continuing Education website.

You might also want to check out the Vancouver Evolution Festival (2009) archived website

Finally, here is my wife's Health Psychology website.

Fab* is always interested in graduate students and post-doc fellows. If you are interested in what you read below, in the fab-lab and in Vancouver, please let us know.

We (me, my students and close colleagues) are very interested in explaining patterns of biodiversity. My primary training is in looking for patterns among species, using a phylogenetic perspective (a phylogeny is just a family tree of species). I am interested in the traits or situations that increase the number of species in a group, either because they speciate more rapidly, or because those that are produced last longer before they go extinct. This second aspect has immediate practical relevance, given the number of species currently being lost. I am also interested in how species form, and specifically how sexual selection and mate choice might affect the process.

In the phylogenetic context, I am interested in how best to build trees, how best to infer ancestral states on trees, and how to use the shapes of trees to make inferences about past speciation and extinction and concomittant trait evolution.

Currently, I am most exercised by better ways to measure the evolutionary 'isolation' (also called distinctiveness, originality, or even uniqueness) of a species. Its age is the simplest way, but it may not be very powerful. For example, one of the three New Zealand Kiwis and any one of the hundreds of crow species may be the same age, but the kiwi has few close relatives and is much more isolated than the crow. Here is a fairly recent (2010) short overview essay . One could incorporate other attributes of value too. We've made a start here (see, for example, this paper by Dave Redding and me) but there is more to do. We are collaborating closely with both Prof. Mike Steel's group in New Zealand, and with EDGE group at the Zoological Society of London via their EDGE of existence program. Dave and Jeff and I are currently working with Dr. Walter Jetz (Yale), Dr. Gavin Thomas (Imperial), and Dr. Klaas Hartmann (UTAS) on applying this idea to birds. A full-length scientific presentation of the basic ideas (from summer 2011) can be found here. Scroll down a bit and press play. The Knowledge Network here in BC also did a short piece on this a few years ago, which gives you the flavour of the idea.

A related area concerns 'evolutionary heritage' or the amount of evolution that geopolitically defined samples of species represent. Indonesia stewards 158 threatened endemic species of bird, equal to about 300 million years of 'at risk' evolutionary heritage that is found nowhere else in the world [the short paper is here].

Finally, in the speciation context, we undertook a series of laboratory-based experiments to test how female behaviour, particularly mate choice, might be involved in starting, maintaining or accelerating divergence. We have looked at incipient mate choice mediated divergence in Israeli fruit flies, and have found evidence of environmentally-mediated changes in mate choice in flies we collected from our own compost piles.

Research Associates

Dr. Jeff Joy (2010-2013) was a Research Associate working on the complete Tree of Birds, his own work on insect diversification - check out this news piece from Nature (2013)! - as well as supervising the lab. He is now working for the Centre for Excellence in HIV-AIDS at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. He is missed.

Dr. Arianne Albert (2007-2009) arrived from Montpellier. Arianne did her PhD. with Dolph Schluter at UBC on stickleback reproductive isolation, and also did some exciting modelling work with Prof. Sally Otto. Dr. Albert continued with her modelling work on the genetics of sexual selection and speciation.

Dr. Anders Odeen (2003-2006) hails from Uppsala, Sweden, where he did his PhD. with Mats Bjorklund. He came as a post-doctoral fellow, and has now returned to Uppsala as a research assistant professor. He has worked on speciation and plumage coloration in wagtails, on the evolution of colour perception in birds, and on population size and speciation experiments in the lab, and has come to get experience in designing lab-based selection experiments, using Drosophila. Here is a representataive paper on bird perception and sexual selection in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA

Dr. Howard Rundle (2001-2003) joined us from UBC. We looked at various aspects of incipient premating isolation (assortative mating) in experimental colonies of fruit flies. He then went off to Australia to work with Mark Blows at the University of Queensland, and is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa.

Dr. Reuven Dukas joined the lab as a research associate from June 2001 to June 2002. He tried to teach me how to look closely at the behaviour of mate choice in insects. We were engaged in experiments investigating the effects of enrichment on mate choice. Dr. Dukas is now a senior faculty member in the department of animal behaviour at MacMaster University. As it happens, some of the research that he performed here at SFU was profiled (May, 2008) in the New York Times!

Dr. Kyle Young was a post-doctoral fellow (2002-2004) officially shared with Dr. Bernie Crespi. His expertise was on the interactions between sexual selection and life history across salmon here on the west coast. The fruit of his labours at SFU can be found in a paper in Proc. Roy. Soc. B. He then went off to the EU to look at morphological divergence in Lake African cichlids with Dr. Ole Seehausen, and then to Peru to work on introduced salmonid evolution there (!), and now is a fisheries scientist in the UK.

Dr. Rutger Vos, a dutchman, was my first PhD. student (finished May, 2006). He started in January, 2001, on the evolution of specialization in Primates, and now, aspects of tree reconstruction. His expertise is in manipulating large phylogenetic datasets (though he is a dab hand at designing websites like this one). He became currently deeply involved in CIPRes, the Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research project, working as a Post-Doc with Prof. Wayne Maddison at UBC. He also helps curate the TreeBase repository. He then went off to work with Prof. Mark Pagel on a Marie Curie Fellowship, and is now a bioinformatician at the National Biodiversity Centre in Leiden.

Graduate students and Visitors

Logan Volkmann is a MSc. student (2012-) working on the phylogeography of alpine red foxes on the west coast and carrying on Iain's work on distinctiveness on networks.

Dr. Tom Martin (2012) is a British bird biogeographer working on representation in Zoos who worked with Haven Havlecek.

Iain Martyn was a Vice President's Research Award holder (2011), newly graduated from McGill (in physics!). He was officially working with Dr. Dave Redding on applying bar-code data to conservation phylogenetics, but was also thinking about various other related problems, including how to extend evolutionary distinctiveness to networks. He went off to New Zealand to work with Mike Steel, and now Rockefeller University to do biophysics.

Rakesh Parhar was a Vice President's Research Award holder (2010) from UBC. He stayed on to work on the loss of phylogenetic diversity under various models of inherited extinction risk. (2011)

(Dr.) Juan Lopez Cantalapiedra was a visiting PhD. student (2008, 2010) from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and their National Museum, working on the ecological correlates of diversification in Ruminant mammals. The fruits of his labours are currently in poster form. He spent the fall (2009) down in Berkeley and came back here for fall 2010. The fruit of his labours can be found on the publications page. He defended his PhD in late fall, 2011 and is now working at the National Museum. Congratulations!

Renske Gudde was a visiting graduate student (all of 2010) from Utrecht University. She is just finishing up (with Jeff Joy) work on the phylogenetic diversity and biogeography of lemurs in Madagascar, using an approach pioneered by Dan Rosauer in Australia. She is also now doing a PhD with Dr. Chris Venditti in Redding, UK.

(Dr.) Dave Redding is a Brit who finished his PhD. (2005 - 2010) on applying phylogenetics to bird conservation. He's back in the UK at the Zoological Society of London (though he visits us occasionally) and Imperial College (working with Prof. Kate Jones , up to his knees conservation biology, including the EDGE programme

Will Stein is a naturalized Canadian who is finishing up a PhD thesis (2005 -) on the relationships, life-history evolution, and conservation of Galliformes worldwide.

Tyker Kuhn is a paleontologist and photographer who finished his MSc. (December 2010) on Ancient DNA of Caribou. He taught us about extinct things more generally. His first paper got a bit of publicity. He worked with Beth Shapiro in the US, and is now back being a biologist in the Yukon.

(Dr.) Klaas Hartmann was a visiting PhD. student (2006) from University of Canterbury (Christchurch, NZ), working on the "Noah's Ark Problem" of prioritizing species for conservation. He is now a senior research scientist at the University of Tasmania Fisheries Institute and a co-author on our big bird paper.

Emily Meuser is an economist and biologist who did an MSc. (2007-2011) on measuring public attitudes to species. She is interested in how different attributes of species (e.g. endangerment, endemism, ecological and evolutionary distinctiveness) are evaluated and valued by Canadians, with the goal of informing public policy, particularly provincial and federal Endangered Species Acts. She is off to law school, so she can actually effect change.

Clea Moray finished a Master's project (in December 2009) on the phylogenetic structure of plant-pollinator communities. She was co-supervised by Dr. Diane Srivastava at UBC. She is now working for the Pacific Salmon Foundation.

Eva Chrostowski spent a year (2002) investigating which countries harbor the most evolutionary heritage in various groups of animals. The fruits of her labours are found in a chapter in an edited volume on Phylogenetics and Conservation (Oxford University Press). Eva has since become a biology teacher.

Undergraduates

Navi Garcha (2012-) is carrying on work with Clea Moray's pollinator-plant networks, in collaboration wtih Dr. Jana Vamosi at the University of Calgary.

Monica Woods (2012) worked with us, and with Dr. Thomas Near at Yale, on the predictors of being an imperiled darter fish.

Haven Havelecek (2011-2012) was an NSERC USRA fellow working with us and with Dr. Tom Martin in the UK on the predictors of being a animal in a zoo that breeds.

Janie Dubman (2010-2012) was an honours student in fall 2010 working on gestation and lactation durations in Primates. She then became an NSERC USRA on that project. She is now doing an MSc. with Wendy Palen here at SFU.

Phoebe Patterson de Heer was a visiting student from Australia (2011-2012) who decided to look at the attributes of animals that are found on stamps! (this was an idea from a grad student in UCSD a few years ago).

Stephanie Standerwick was an NSERC USRA in fall 2010 testing a prediction on the correlates of homosexual behaviour in animals. She is also a locally-famous rock star.

Gordon Smith (2009-) is an ornithologist who did an undergrad research project with Will Stein, inferring a full species-level Galliform tree (the one that Jan Verspoor started in 2006). He is now the lab Research Assistant.

Karen Magnuson-Ford (2008 - 2010) was an NSERC USRA working on the evolutionary conservation value of Rockfish, in close collaboration with Travis Ingram, a PhD student of Dr. Jon Shurin's at UBC (now at UCSD). She spent the fall of 2009 in NZ, working with Mike Steel and his students, and has now finished a MSc. with Prof. Sally Otto at UBC on ancestor reconstruction.

Jan Verspoor did an honour's project (2006) on using consensus to help infer large trees together with Will Stein (and got a publication). Jan finihsed an MSc. degree with Prof. John Reynolds here at SFU, and then went off to law school.

Aki Mimoto (2005-2007) was an undergraduate independent studies student who worked closely with Dave Redding on a couple of conservation phylogenetic projects. He produced a couple of co-authored publications too and still helps us a great deal with perl scripting. Aki is also a photographer, and his old website gives you a taste of his many talents.

Nick Charrette was a NSERC-supported undergraduate student (2003-2005) who looked at the effect of disturbance on endemic Bornean butterflies, in collaboration with Dr. Danny Cleary at the University of Amsterdam and Naturalis in the Netherlands. The fruits of his labours appear in Ecology, or here. Nick went off to look at monkeys in South America, lived on an organic farm in Nova Scotia, and now is up to heavens knows what.

Sharina Dodsworth was an independent study student (2002-2003) who helped with an interesting study on the evolutionary heritage of carnivores in the Americas. Her paper is here. She became a national coordinator for a science education and outreach program in Ottawa, and is now doing environemental science outreach and research up north.

Rebecca Lewis is an ex-undergraduate honours student (2002) who tested some hypotheses of Drosophila systematics using mitochondrial DNA, co-supervised with Prof. Andy Beckenbach. She is off being a biology patent lawyer.

Anna Drake worked as an NSERC undergraduate researcher (2001-2002) and then as an independent study student on the Evolution Valley Drosophila melanogaster pair. She finished an MSc. in Animal Welfare at UBC and is back at SFU (2008-2013) defending a PhD with Dr. David Green on bird migration.

Dennis Wong is an ex-undergraduate (2001) who built the first-ever supertree of pocketgophers and kangaroomice, and did experiments looking at the effects of early childhood experience on mate choice in various Drosophila populations. He was pretty much in charge of the lab too. He ran off to do a graduate degree with Dr. Steve Heard , and then went on (2009-) to an interdisciplinary genomics PhD in Dalhousie.