Description
Donald Price, professor in the UNLV School of Life Sciences, will speak at an upcoming Virtual Science Café Las Vegas. His virtual presentation is titled, "Hawaiian Drosophila: How to Evolve 1,000 Species in Just 25 Million Years."
The Hawaiian Islands were formed over the past 25+ million years by a geological ‘hot-spot’ where volcanic activity deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean occurs as the Pacific plate moves in a north-western direction. The Hawaiian Islands are also an evolutionary biology ‘hot-spot’ with some of the best examples of explosive adaptive radiation of species groups. The Hawaiian Drosophila radiation has approximately 800-1,000 species that only exist in the main Hawaiian Islands. This accounts for about 1/3 of all Drosophila species in the world. The species are a treasure trove of fascinating changes in behavior, plant-insect interactions, microbiomes, gene regulation, and genomic changes.
The virtual presentation will be presented via Zoom.