NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology combine research and training components to prepare young scientists for careers in biology and provide them an opportunity to establish international collaborations and take advantage of research facilities and opportunities abroad. Forging strong international collaborations is mutually beneficial to the U.S. and the foreign hosts. This fellowship to Matthew H. Van Dam concerns research on the environmental factors that influence the seeming over-abundance of Australasian weevils. The host institutions are the Zoological State Collection, Munich (ZSM) and the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe (SMNK), and the sponsoring scientists are Michael Balke and Alexander Riedel. Field work and outreach are also being conducted with the UK Darwin Initiative to train the next generation of conservation biologists in Papua New Guinea for advising decision makers on land use management in PNG. This fellowship is supported by both the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Office of International and Integrative Activities at NSF.
The research addresses a fundamental question of how the evolution of hyper-diverse groups proceeds by targeting an extreme example of ecological super-saturation in the weevil genus Trigonopterus. It seeks to explain the elevated species richness in this group as an exemplar of what is seen in the taxa of the Australasian region as a whole. In addition, it tests a long held hypothesis explaining the high levels of endemism seen in tropical regions versus temperate ones. This has implications not only in Janzen's 1967 hypothesis about why barriers to dispersal are greater in tropical mountains versus temperate mountains, but also for seeing how labile physiological traits adapt to changing climate in predictive models.
Training goals include acquiring bioinformatic tools to analyze genomic data and answer questions on the evolution of hyper-diverse groups using weevil as the model. Educational activities include training undergraduate students, including those from under-represented groups, in weevil taxonomy and molecular systematics. These skills have direct application to agriculture, as many weevils are agricultural pests. Having an understanding of the fauna of this region will aid in the identification of new or newly invasive agricultural pests, e.g. the red palm weevil Rhynchophorus ferrugineus from Southeast Asia.
