2023
Dolph Schluter
Evolutionary biologist recognized as world leader in study of rapid diversification of species

2023
Evolutionary biologist recognized as world leader in study of rapid diversification of species
“We regard Dr. Schluter as the leader in ecological studies of the origin of species over the last four decades.” That’s how Prof. Ove Eriksson of Stockholm University, chair of the prize committee for the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, describes the impact of evolutionary biologist Dolph Schluter’s work. Dr. Schluter, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has been awarded the Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) and the Crafoord Foundation for his research into the role of natural selection in adaptive radiation and the origin of species.
The Crafoord Prize, which includes $780,000 to fund further research by the winner, is awarded in disciplines the RSAS doesn’t consider for Nobel Prizes.
The study of adaptive radiation looks at how new species are formed and how they become different from one another.
“It involves questions about the role and mechanisms of natural selection, the origin of species and their subsequent divergence. Our concept of what a species is has changed a lot since Darwin. When you go out into nature and you see different species, the reason they don’t all collapse into a single hybrid mess is because they possess this characteristic that we call reproductive isolation. They’ve evolved characteristics that prevent them from interbreeding.”
Dr. Schluter
Dr. Schluter became interested in the problem of the origin of species while doing PhD work on Galapagos finches. Later he started working on three-spined stickleback fish in B.C., “which are marvelous creatures because they include some of the youngest species on Earth.” It is thought to take on average about two million years for a single lineage to split into two new species, he explains. With the Galapagos finches, it’s down to about 100,000 years.
“These sticklebacks, they occur exclusively in lakes that are only 10,000 years old. They’re abundant in those lakes and we can bring them in the lab and do experiments. They had characteristics that reminded me of the finches; they were young and they co-occur in the same sort of isolated places.
No more than two species of stickleback occur in any one lake, but pairs of species in different lakes seem to have evolved completely independently of other pairs. They have properties that allow Dr. Schluter’s team to address very basic questions concerning the roles of resources, species interactions, phenotypic plasticity, sexual selection and other factors in the evolution of diversity.
Dr. Schluter and colleague Dr. Sally Otto, a 2023 winner of the Killam Prize, are donating funds from their awards to endow a postdoctoral fellowship in biodiversity studies at UBC.