Dolph Schluter

Dr. Dolph Schluter is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair of Zoology at University of British Columbia. Schluter’s research investigates the ecological forces responsible for the origin and persistence of species as well as the evolution of differences between species in resource use, body form, and mating preferences. He also studies the evolution of global biodiversity gradients. Schluter’s earliest work was carried out on Darwin's famous finches in the Galápagos Islands. More recently his work has focused on the radiation of new species of threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus spp.) in lakes of coastal British Columbia, Canada. The species are among the youngest on earth and occur in lakes that are less than 12,000 years old. No more than two species occur in any one lake, but pairs of species in different lakes seem to have evolved completely independently of other pairs, enabling Schluter and his lab to address very basic questions concerning the roles of resources, species interactions, phenotypic plasticity, sexual selection and other factors in the evolution of diversity.

The Schluter lab’s current research on these sticklebacks has three main directions, including: (1) the role of competition and predation in the evolution of differences between species; (2) the origin and persistence of species; and (3) the genetic basis of species differences. Schluter’s work has provided field data to show the role of natural selection and ecology in speciation and has demonstrated evolutionary basis of major biodiversity gradients, including the species-area relationship and the latitudinal gradient in species diversity. He is the author of the keystone text on adaptive radiation, The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation, as well as the coauthor of The Analysis of Biological Data with Michael Whitlock. Schluter has received widespread recognition for his work, including the Young Investigator Prize, the President’s Award, and the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists, the Charles A. McDowell Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rosenblatt Award, the Killam Mentoring Award, the Killam Senior Research Fellowship, and the Darwin-Wallace Medal. His numerous peer-reviewed publications appear in prominent journals such as Evolution, Nature, Science, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution.