About Dr Kenneth Halanych
Dr Halanych’s lab is interested in marine invertebrate diversity and asks the question of how morphological variation arose on different time scales and using different types of genomic information. For more information you can visit the website https://halanych-lab.github.io/.
Evolution of marine Antarctic invertebrates: Population genetic structure and genomic adaptations
Antarctica is an enormous continent that is cold, remote, and particularly sensitive to climate change. Biogeographic patterns in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, and the processes explaining how those patterns came about, still await adequate explanation. Both terrestrial and marine organisms have been influenced by climatic change (e.g., glaciation), physical phenomena (e.g., oceanic currents), and/or potential barriers to gene flow (e.g., steep thermal gradients). Genomic scale approaches using thousands of loci are helping clarify our understand of Antarctic patterns. I will talk about some of the recent studies testing ideas of circumpolar distributions, transport across the Antarctic Polar Front, and transantarctic exchange. Additionally, recent data suggest relatively modern processes within the last few million years, rather than geological events that occurred in the Eocene and Miocene, account for present patterns of biodiversity in the region. We are beginning to explore the genomes of select taxa to understand the roles that selection and genetic drift have played shaping diversity in the Southern Ocean.