Annual General Meeting and President's lecture
08-Dec-2010 - 08-Dec-2010
The Systematics Association
Annual General Meeting and President's lecture
Cichlid fish as a model for studying the microevolution to macroevolution continuum
Professor Ole Seehausen
University of Bern, Switzerland and
EAWAG Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology
The Linnean Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London
Wednesday 8th December 2010, 6 pm (following AGM at 5pm)
The meeting is open to visitors. Wine will be served after the lecture
to members and guests. Please advertise this lecture as widely as you can.
The associations' AGM will be held before the lecture at 5pm.
Abstract:
Cichlid fish in African Great lakes have made spectacular radiations
into hundreds of endemic species in very short time. Because they
not only speciated rapidly, but built complex ecological communities
with incredible alpha diversity in short time too, cichlid fish are
fantastic systems to study various questions regarding the continuum
from microevolution to macroevolution and from population ecology
to macroecology. I will give a few examples from our work, starting
where we try to reveal mechanisms during initiation and completion of
speciation, through work about species persistence and coexistence,
and ending with attempts to explain macropatterns in the distribution
of cichlid diversity.
