Prof. Dr. Ole Seehausen Fish Ecology and Evolution Eawag Seestrasse 79 6047 Kastanienbaum Switzerland

Phone +41 58 765 2121 Fax +41 58 765 2168 Office SL-B16 ole.seehausen@eawag.ch

Ole Seehausen

Function

• Head of the department Fish Ecology and Evolution

• Co-director of the Institute of Zoology of the University of Berne

Academic & research interests

I am an evolutionary ecologist by training, even though my research program is probably best described as integrative biology. I am interested in the evolutionary processes and ecological mechanisms of origins and maintenance of biological diversity. This includes the ecology and genetics of ecological and behavioural polymorphisms and speciation, evolutionary community ecology, macro-ecology and conservation biology.

I have spent most of the past years studying the large adaptive radiations of cichlid fish in African lakes, in especially the radiations of haplochromines in Lake Victoria and smaller lakes in Tanzania and Uganda, and in the Zambezi region of sourthern Africa. Many hundred species have emerged in these radiations between the late Pleistocene and the Recent, somewhere between 10,000 and 250,000 years. These are not only the largest and fastest adaptive radiations known in the animal kingdom, but cichlid fish are perfectly suited for experimental work in laboratory settings. Unfortunately, haplochromine cichlids also experienced the fastest large scale extinction event ever observed by humans. Due to eutrophication of Lake Victoria, and the arrival of a non-native predator, perhaps as many 200 endemic cichlid species disappeared in the past 20 years.

Taken together, these three facts make cichlids perhaps the best vertebrate model organism for the study of the evolution and maintenance of species diversity.

I am a strong believer in comparative approaches in ecology and evolutionary biology. More recently my group began to investigate adaptive radiations in salmon-like fish in the postglacial lake system of the European Alps. Switzerland alone has an impressive ecological radiation of anywhere between 20 and 50 endemic species of whitefish (Coregonus spp.) most of which most likely originated in the past 15,000 years. Like in the African cichlids, in whitefish too it appears that most larger lakes gave rise to their own endemic radiations, allowing for comparative analysis of “biodiversification” between replicate radiations. And again, at least 20% of the endemic whitefish diversity of Switzerland was lost in the past 50 years, allowing for comparative analysis of extinction.

Using cichlid fish, salmon-like fish, and other species, people in my lab address conceptual issues of broader relevance to the understanding of variation in biodiversity. Such issues include the effects of historical contingency versus ecology on diversification and extinction, the relationship between neutral genetic diversity and adaptive diversity, the role of interspecific hybridization. To address these issues we combine a variety of methods that include field-based ecology, lab-based behaviour studies and experimental genetics, molecular population genetics, phylogenetics, and computer modeling.

Curriculum vitae

• 2001-2004, Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution in the Department of Biological Sciences of the University of Hull, UK
• 1999-2001, Marie Curie research fellow at the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Southampton, Division of Biodiversity and Ecology, UK
• 1999, PhD cum Laude from the Institute of Biology at the University of Leiden, Department of Animal Ecology, The Netherlands
• 1993, MSc degree from the Department of Biology at the University of Hanover

Honors and Awards

• 2001, American Naturalist Award, American Society of Naturalists
• 2001, Junior Scholar of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
• 1998, Dutch Zoology Price. Royal Netherlands Zoological Society
• 1998, Finalist in annual contest for best paper in Science 1997 American Association for the Advancement of Science)

Previous whereabouts

• Department of Animal Ecology, University of Leiden
• Ecology & Biodiversity Division, School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton
• Department of Biological Sciences, University of Hull
• Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute
• Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia
  

Publications

Eawag Publications

Other Publications (1988 - 2003)