Abstract

My work focusses on the impact of sex and gene flow on the processes of adaptation and speciation, and I use experimental speciation to study this. The evolution of strong reproductive isolation is fundamental to the origins and maintenance of biological diversity. Speciation is the result of evolutionary processes that generate barriers to gene flow between populations, facilitating reproductive isolation. The progression and outcome of speciation depend on interactions between evolutionary forces that act with varying importance over space and time to either facilitate or impede the evolution of reproductive isolation. Over the past decade, speciation genomics has provided better predictions on how barrier loci spread in the genome and how speciation-with-gene-flow can occur. However, these developments remain difficult to test in natural populations and have not been widely adopted in experimental speciation research. Experimental speciation promises to be an excellent complement to snapshot studies of natural populations because it can disentangle recurring problems that confound studies of natural populations. Here I will introduce my study system, using an evolve and resequence approach in monogonont rotifers to understand how evolutionary forces influence the speciation process.