| 1 | Name: | Dr. Dolph Schluter | |
| Institution: | University of British Columbia | ||
| Year Elected: | 2024 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1955 | ||
Dolph Schluter received his BSc in ecology in 1977 from the University of Guelph, Ontario, and his PhD in 1983 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the supervision of Peter R. Grant (elected to APS 1991). For his PhD thesis, Schluter studied ecological mechanisms driving assembly and evolution of island assemblages of Darwin's finch species. He and an assistant spent nearly two years living in a tent on remote and otherwise uninhabited Galápagos islands collecting field data. Schluter’s work on the finches culminated in the first estimates from nature of “adaptive landscapes” (mean fitness functions), which successfully predicted mean beak sizes of Galápagos ground finches on islands. He was able to compare these landscapes to fitness functions from survival data on natural selection, using a method he also pioneered, and to test evolutionary shifts caused by interspecific competition between species. This work was a key component of the long-term study of the Darwin's finches that is regarded as the most successful ever field study of evolution. Schluter obtained a tenure track position at UBC in 1989, where he played a steering role in building one of the world’s strongest research groups in biodiversity science. Between 1983 and 1990 Schluter studied the evolution of continental bird assemblages, during which he developed methods to estimate convergence between faunas. This work led to a collaboration with R. E. Ricklefs that produced a highly influential coedited volume on global patterns of species diversity (Chicago, 1993). Schluter’s group continued to work on the evolution of the latitudinal gradient in species diversity. They showed, surprisingly, that speciation rates are often as higher or higher in the temperate zone, where few species are present, than in the much more species-rich tropics. This finding has since been confirmed by numerous other researchers. In the late 1980’s, Schluter initiated work on threespine stickleback fish in BC, which enabled his landmark experimental and comparative studies on mechanisms driving the origin and divergence of new species. This work yielded advances on many significant research problems in adaptive radiation, and his stickleback species pairs have become one of the best-known natural study systems in evolutionary biology. The work inspired many ideas, culminating in his now classic text, "The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation" (Oxford, 2000). His subsequent collaboration with D. Kingsley and C. Peichel led to the discovery of key genes underlying species differences and made the stickleback a “supermodel” for studies of adaptive genetic variation. He continues to work on the ecology and genetics of adaptation and speciation in stickleback. Research Interests I investigate recent adaptive radiation, whereby a single ancestor diversifies rapidly into an array of species that inhabit a variety of environments and that differ in traits used to exploit those environments. I am especially interested in the selection pressures that drive the origin of new species, the ecological interactions that lead to the evolution of species differences, the genetic basis of these differences, and the wider impacts of diversification on ecosystems. I addressed these questions initially in field studies of Darwin’s finches, but over recent decades I have developed for study a natural system having many advantages for experimental study, the threespine sticklebacks of fresh water and coastal marine areas of British Columbia. My work has included the quantitative estimation of natural selection surfaces and ancestral traits, the experimental study of species interactions, natural selection and evolution, and the discovery of genes underlying phenotypic differences between populations and species and their fitness consequences. My second interest is the role of evolutionary processes and historical events in the development and maintenance of Earth's major biodiversity gradients. | |||