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Profile of Dolph Schluter PROFILE PROFILE Profile of Dolph Schluter PROFILE Beth Azar, Science Writer Dolph Schluter explores the origin of species on Earth, species differences among sticklebacks. In their Inau- an avenue of research he has pursued with persis- gural Article, Schluter, Kingsley, and colleagues point tence, creativity, and methodical precision for more to a stickleback gene that appears to have a dramatic than 40 years. Schluter has taken what for Darwin was effect on fitness in adapting populations. mainly a thought experiment and applied modern experimental methods to provide scientific evidence Evolving Interests of the process of natural selection on species’ origins Schluter, a son of Dutch immigrants, grew up the sec- and the evolution of differences between species. He ond of five children in the suburbs of Montreal, Canada. moved from field studies of Darwin’s finches on the The family lived in an English-speaking enclave west of Gal ´apagosIslands to experimental ponds filled with Montreal where Schluter spent his childhood roaming threespine stickleback fish on the University of British through fields, woods, and ponds. “I used to bring Columbia (UBC) campus, where he is a professor of home frogs and snakes and bugs,” he says. “I was very evolutionary biology. Schluter was elected as a foreign interested in natural history.” associate of the National Academy of Sciences in His love of animals prompted Schluter’s attendance 2017. His Inaugural Article (1) is a joint project with at the closest school with a veterinary program, the his long-time collaborator David Kingsley, with whom University of Guelph in Ontario. There, his fascination he has worked to discover key genes that underlie with ecology and evolution began with an introductory Dolph Schluter. Image credit: The Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia/Sylvia Heredia. Published under the PNAS license. This is a Profile of a member of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany the member’s Inaugural Article, e1914889118, in vol. 118, issue 3. Published Januray 11, 2021. PNAS 2021 Vol. 118 No. 3 e2025630118 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025630118 | 1of3 Downloaded by guest on October 2, 2021 evolution course taught by Ronald Brooks. “Igrewup been verified in other species. The computer models in a Catholic community and there was something also confirmed the hypothesis that food supply and strangely compelling and interesting about the idea that competition among species determine morphological we evolved from apes,” he says. properties of finch communities (3). Schluter began reading works by evolutionary bi- Schluter continued similar work on the evolution of ologists Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay seed-eating finches during his postdoctoral stint at the Gould. “These were powerful thinkers and I thought it University of California, Davis and at UBC. Working was remarkable the progress you could make under- under University of California, Davis ecologist Thomas standing how life evolved just by thinking very deeply Schoener and UBC’s Jamie Smith, he used museum about it and bringing in a few facts when necessary,” collections to measure birds from Hawaii and the he recalls. mainland, and spent time in the field in the American Despite his budding interest in evolution, Schluter Southwest. Schluter later worked in East Africa (4). But did not plan to continue his studies immediately after the work discouraged him. “I thought that I could do graduating. Instead, he accepted a job surveying comparisons [of birds] for decades and never get mammals in the Athabasca tar sands in central Canada. closer than I already had in understanding the role of Then, in his final semester, Brooks recommended competitive interactions between species and their Schluter attend a lecture by Bob Montgomerie, a PhD evolution,” he says. student at McGill University. Montgomerie described his work on territorial behavior in hummingbirds based Experimental Islands “ on fieldwork in Mexico. It was my first exposure to Schluter wanted to find a system where he could do someone studying evolutionary biology in a field set- experiments on natural selection. “I was interested in ” “ ting, says Schluter. Not just thinking very deeply and experimental trials in which we could introduce to is- writing about it, but actually studying costs and benefits lands either species alone or together and ask whether ” of territorial behavior in a wild population. competition between them occurred, and whether, if Schluter asked Montgomerie if he needed an as- it occurred, it would change natural selection,” he sistant. Montgomerie referred Schluter to his McGill says. University advisor and evolutionary biologist Peter By then Schluter was doing a 5-year university re- Grant, now an emeritus professor at Princeton Univer- search fellowship that soon turned into a tenure-track sity. Schluter interviewed with Grant and learned about faculty position at UBC. There, he learned about the Grant’s ongoing project studying Darwin’s finches in threespine stickleback, a small fish that exists in oceans, the Galapagos ´ along with his wife and collaborator freshwater lakes, and streams all over the northern Rosemary Grant, also now an emeritus professor at hemisphere. UBC zoology professor J. Donald McPhail Princeton. Schluter decided that if Grant accepted him, had found stickleback pairs in nearby small coastal he would get a Master’s degree. If not, he would head lakes. The pairs of sticklebacks appeared to be distinct to the tar sands. species: benthics, which are larger and feed on inver- tebrates in the mud close to shore, and limnetics, which Adapting on the Fly are smaller, more slender, and feed in the open water Grant offered Schluter a research position and invited on zooplankton (5). him to his new department at the University of Mich- “These species occur only in these tiny lakes that igan, which did not offer a research Master’s degree. ” “ So in the fall of 1977, Schluter enrolled as a PhD stu- are about 10,000 years old, says Schluter. And be- dent. By January 1978, he had joined the Grants and a cause they had evolved repeatedly, we could start to research assistant in the Gal ´apagos. Thus began a do comparative work and experiments that tested the ” multiyear quest to study adaptive radiation in Darwin’s role of natural selection in the origin of the species. finches. Schluter used field observations and computer Along with big aquariums in his laboratory, Schluter modeling to understand why the six species of ground constructed ponds on the UBC campus so he could finches on the Gal´apagos evolved from a common experiment with the stickleback in a natural setting. He ancestor to possess unique characteristics. “I was trying started with 13 ponds in 1991 and now has a new fa- to understand the overarching contribution that re- cility with 20 ponds. Because each stickleback species sources and resource competition between species was adapted to a contrasting environment within a lake, played in the adaptive radiation of this seed-eating Schluter could transplant fish from one environment to group of finches on the Gal´apagos,” he explains. another and observe the effects. He found that phe- Additionally, Schluter examined differences in notypic differences between the species made a huge beak size when two ecologically similar finches—in difference in their ability to forage and grow in those this case two species of seed-eating ground finch— environments (6). In addition, because the two species evolved together, competing for resources on the can mate and produce hybrids, he could test the fitness same island, or in isolation, each living alone on an of these hybrids in both environments. “Hybrids aren’t island. He found that finches living together were infertile,” explains Schluter. “In the [laboratory] they do more different from each other than finches living fine. But in the wild they fall between the niches of their alone, in large part because of the effect of resource parents and are mismatched in traits inherited in dif- competition (2). This study lent strong support for the ferent mixtures from their parent species, so they don’t concept of character displacement, which has since do well in either environment.” This work helped 2of3 | PNAS Azar https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025630118 Profile of Dolph Schluter Downloaded by guest on October 2, 2021 provide further evidence for Darwin’s theory that nat- in a standard design and found only one hit: EDA, the ural selection drives the origin of species (7). gene associated with armor plating. “Females that had Another line of research examined how reproduc- two copies of the freshwater allele at that locus produced tive isolation might evolve. Schluter showed that twice as many offspring on average as the females with benthics from one lake mate much more readily with two copies of the marine allele,” Schluter says. benthics from another lake than they do with limnetics To help understand the finding, Kingsley and from another lake, and vice versa (8). “We call that Schluter examined changes in the frequency of EDA pattern of repeated evolution of mating compatibilities over many generations in a population of stickleback under similar environmental conditions parallel specia- introduced to a small lake in Alaska in the 1980s. The – tion. We saw it in limnetic benthic species pairs, and strength of selection on EDA is the same in the Alas- we also tested it with a global sample comparing the kan lake as it is in the pond experiment. The finding mating compatibilities of marine and stream-resident suggests that EDA is a powerful target for natural se- ” stickleback populations from around the world, says lection in stickleback, but all the reasons are not yet “ Schluter. We see the same pattern and we think that known. “We know that EDA affects armor, a defensive part of the reason is that their behaviors evolved in trait, but we also know that it affects schooling behavior concert with their similar phenotypes, which have and other traits,” says Schluter.
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