AQUATIC HOUSING TO STUDY THE ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION OF FISHES AT THE BAMFIELD MARINE SCIENCES CENTRE

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Understanding how organisms are so tightly associated with their environments, and the impact this has on communities, represents a fundamental objective of ecology and evolution. Adaptation is a genetic process of evolutionary change, driven by natural selection, resulting in organisms that are well suited to their environment. Our research uses populations of a small fish species, the threespine stickleback, to test these questions. We test hypotheses that adaptation to environmental change is due to genetic changes through the use of experiments (common garden and reciprocal transplants) and molecular methods (genetic mapping and gene expression) that can isolate and study the genes that control these traits. We examine if changes in the environment leave a signature of natural selection on the genomes of locally adapted populations, learning what genes and traits have been the target of natural selection during adaptation to environmental change. Achieving these objectives will lead to better predictions of how organisms evolve in response to rapid environmental changes in nature.