Arne Mooers Associate Professor, 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

Please check out our fantastic Vancouver Evolution Festival (2009) website

Also, you can go straight to my intellectual home here: SFU's fab*-lab of evolution

Finally on the click-through front, there is the endangered species science advocacy site Scientists for Species

I hope to take on a couple of new graduate students on in Fall 2010. If you are interested in what you read below, in the fab-lab and in Vancouver, please let me 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 'originality' or evolutionary 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 original than the crow. 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 I are currently working with Dr. Walter Jetz (Yale), Dr. Gavin Thomas (Imperial), and Dr. Klaas Hartmann (UTAS) on applying this idea to birds. The Knowledge Network here in BC did a short piece on this , 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) will be starting as a Research Associate in early 2010. He is working on the structure of complete Tree of Birds

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. Check out his latest 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 recently (May, 2008) profiled 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 (!)

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 and is currently working with Prof. Mark Pagel on a Marie Curie Fellowship.

Graduate students and Visitors

Juan Lopez Cantalapiedra is a visiting PhD. student (2008-) 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 is due back here in September 2010.

Renske Gudde is a visiting graduate student (2010) from Utrecht University. She is working on the phylogenetic diversity and biogeography of lemurs in Madagascar, using an approach pioneered by Dan Rosauer in Australia.

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.

Dave Redding is a Brit on loan from the RSPB, is just finishing up a PhD. (2005 -) on applying phylogenetics to bird conservation.

Tyker Kuhn is a paleontologist and photographer is doing a MSc. (2007-) on Ancient DNA of Caribou. He is teaching us about extinct things more generally.

Emily Meuser is an economist and biologist who started her MSc. (2007-) 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.

Clea Moray just finished a Master's project (December 2009) on the phylogenetic structure of plant-pollinator communities. She was co-supervised by Dr. Diane Srivastava at UBC.

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

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 -) was an NSERC summer student 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 is now embarking on a MSc. with Sally Otto at UBC.

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 is now doing a graduate degree with Prof. John Reynolds here at SFU.

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. Aki is also a photographer, and his 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 is off looking at monkeys in South America.

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-) doing 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 now (2009-) an interdisciplinary genomics PhD in Dalhousie.