Preface to the Princeton Landmarks in Biology Edition vii Preface xi Symbols Used xiii 1. The Importance of Islands 3 2. Area and Number of Speicies 8 3. Further Explanations of the Area-Diversity Pattern 19 4. The Strategy of Colonization 68 5. Invasibility and the Variable Niche 94 6. Stepping Stones and Biotic Exchange 123 7. Evolutionary Changes Following Colonization 145 8. Prospect 181 Glossary 185 References 193 Index 201

The Theory of Island Biogeography

So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to

Human biochemical genetics

There is now ample evidence of the ecological impacts of recent climate change, from polar terrestrial to tropical marine environments. The responses of both flora and fauna span an array of ecosystems and organizational hierarchies, from the species to the community levels. Despite continued uncertainty as to community and ecosystem trajectories under global change, our review exposes a coherent pattern of ecological change across systems. Although we are only at an early stage in the projected trends of global warming, ecological responses to recent climate change are already clearly visible.

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Ecological responses to recent climate change.

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Human-dominated marine ecosystems are experiencing accelerating loss of populations and species, with largely unknown consequences. We analyzed local experiments, long-term regional time series, and global fisheries data to test how biodiversity loss affects marine ecosystem services across temporal and spatial scales. Overall, rates of resource collapse increased and recovery potential, stability, and water quality decreased exponentially with declining diversity. Restoration of biodiversity, in contrast, increased productivity fourfold and decreased variability by 21%, on average. We conclude that marine biodiversity loss is increasingly impairing the ocean's capacity to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations. Yet available data suggest that at this point, these trends are still reversible.

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Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services.

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Handbook of fish biology and fisheries. Volume 2: Fisheries.

(1993). Choosing prey size: A comparison of static and dynamic foraging models for predicting prey choice by fish. Marine Behaviour and Physiology: Vol. 23, Behavioural Ecology of Fishes, pp. 91-104.

Choosing prey size: a comparison of static and dynamic foraging models for predicting prey choice by fish

Animals can use socially transmitted information to learn about the distribution and quality of resources without incurring the costs associated with having to search for and sample them first hand. Recently, it has been shown that the use of chemical social information specific to patterns of diet and habitat use is an important mechanism underpinning recognition and social organization in shoaling fishes. In this study we revealed that the use of resource-specific chemical information is not limited to conspecifics, or even members of the same taxon. In a series of laboratory experiments, we showed that threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) could recognize similar patterns of habitat use in common prawns (Leander serratus), preferentially orientating towards groups of prawns exposed to the same habitats as themselves, and even selecting foraging patches located close to them. Prawns were seen to use habitat-specific cues generated by conspecifics, but not by sticklebacks, suggesting that the benefits of forming these heterospecific social association patterns may be unequal for prawns and fishes. Our findings suggest that some species might use co-occurring, unrelated species as information centres in order to orient and locate resources within their surroundings.

/pdf/shoal-and-prey-patch-choice-by-co-occurring-fishes-and-1u71kj22ob.pdf

Shoal and prey patch choice by co-occurring fishes and prawns: inter-taxa use of socially transmitted cues

Searching behaviour and catch of horse mackerel (Trachurus murphyi) by industrial purse-seiners off south-central Chile

Seamounts can be considered as islands in the deep. For many species, depth is just as much a barrier to dispersal as is the water between oceanic islands. This leads to the hypothesis that seamounts could be places where speciation readily occurs. Recent advances in the theory of island biogeography have allowed some detailed predictions about the degree of endemism and the diver- sity of species on oceanic islands. We have adapted this theory to seamounts, as underwater equiva- lents of islands. Three elements of this theory were tested as an illustration of what could be done, using published data on the diversity of reef-dwelling and benthic fish species found along the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain in the Pacific. Poor sampling makes it impossible at present to test the hypothesis that endemism is a humped function of seamount age. The data agrees with a fur- ther prediction that the total number of species is a humped function of seamount age. Finally, the prediction that fish diversity should be a function of seamount age and area is unsupported. We pro- pose that the theory we have attempted to test could serve as a guide to what fish diversity might be expected from further sampling work.

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Paul J. B. Hart

Papers

Handbook of fish biology and fisheries. Volume 2: Fisheries.

Choosing prey size: a comparison of static and dynamic foraging models for predicting prey choice by fish

Shoal and prey patch choice by co-occurring fishes and prawns: inter-taxa use of socially transmitted cues

Searching behaviour and catch of horse mackerel (Trachurus murphyi) by industrial purse-seiners off south-central Chile

An application of the theory of island biogeography to fish speciation on seamounts

Paul J. B. Hart

Papers

Handbook of fish biology and fisheries. Volume 2: Fisheries.

Choosing prey size: a comparison of static and dynamic foraging models for predicting prey choice by fish

Shoal and prey patch choice by co-occurring fishes and prawns: inter-taxa use of socially transmitted cues

Searching behaviour and catch of horse mackerel (Trachurus murphyi) by industrial purse-seiners off south-central Chile

An application of the theory of island ­biogeography to fish speciation on seamounts

An application of the theory of island biogeography to fish speciation on seamounts