Species and spaces: molecular ecological analyses of biodiversity

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Most life on our planet weighs less than a few grams, experiences the world through smell and taste, and in all likelihood is unknown to science or to you. Traditional methods of identifying biodiversity and species or populations needing conservation generally use larger and better understood organisms as umbrella, or indicator, species to represent this vast bolus of biodiversity. However, such an approach does not do justice to small life, or our understanding of the processes that have formed the patterns of biodiversity within which we live today. The research in my lab uses a molecular ecological approach (using molecular genetic data to study organisms in the wild) to better understand cryptic species and fragmented spaces. Underestimating biodiversity, due to lack of morphological discontinuities or differentiation, has a dramatic and serious effect on our capacity to properly understand interactions between species. This knowledge gap will be exacerbated in a world with changing climate. Decisions regarding species membership have a cascade of consequences on our understanding of biodiversity, speciation, population connectivity and landscape fragmentation and my research program is designed to test the identification of, and concepts behind, species. I use two model systems to explore species evolution, cryptic species and population connectivity: ant species on isolated Costa Rican volcanoes and tropical and temperate parasitoid insect species involved in complex food webs. Each model system is characterised by its degree of spatial and temporal isolation and by species at the leading edge of the taxonomic impediment. Here, an integrative approach is critical to our understanding of population connection and morphological crypsis and so I use molecular ecological tools (standardized mtDNA and nuclear markers and real time PCR reactions), morphological taxonomy and field ecology. My interdisciplinary approach tests these evolutionary and ecological processes, permits more accurate conservation and leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution.