A Multidisciplinary Approach to Species Boundaries in Tropical Reef Corals

热带硬珊瑚有数千种。 珊瑚是热带海洋生态系统的组成部分，在生产力，多样性和生物复杂性方面与热带雨林相媲美。 尽管硬珊瑚在海洋生态系统中发挥着基本的生态和经济作用，但人们对多样化和物种形成的过程知之甚少。 为了了解新珊瑚物种之间的隔离屏障是如何演变的，这项研究将结合联合收割机的形态学，古生物学，DNA序列数据和实地实验数据，以评估物种边界对基因流的渗透性。 对这个热带珊瑚系统的研究将回答进化生物学中的两个基本问题：1）生态过程如何影响物种形成的速度，以及2）面对基因流，物种边界如何维持？ 这项研究为来自夏威夷、中太平洋群岛和巴拿马共和国的代表性不足和非传统学生提供了培训机会。 由于气候变化，过度捕捞和城市发展的增加，珊瑚礁在全球范围内正在下降。 该提案的数据和调查结果将有助于了解极其丰富但日益受到威胁的热带海洋生态系统中物种多样性的起源和维持。

Tropical hard corals are represented by thousands of species. Corals are the building blocks of a tropical marine ecosystem that rivals rainforests in productivity, diversity, and biological complexity. Despite fundamental ecological and economic roles that hard corals play in marine ecosystems, the process of diversification and speciation are poorly understood. To understand how isolating barriers evolve between new coral species, this research will combine data from morphology, paleontology, DNA sequence data, and field experiments to assess the permeability of species boundaries to gene flow. Research on this tropical coral system will answer two fundamental questions in evolutionary biology: 1) how do ecological processes affect the rate of speciation, and 2) how are species boundaries maintained in the face of gene flow? This research provides training opportunities for under-represented and non-traditional students from the state of Hawaii, Central Pacific Islands, and the Republic of Panama. Coral reefs are in global decline due to climate change, over-fishing, and increasing urban development. Data and findings from this proposal will aid in understanding the origin and maintance of species diversity in extremely rich, but increasingly threatened, tropical marine ecosystems.