1. Distribution of the deepwater sculpin, Myoxocephalus quadricornis thompsoni

The deepwater sculpin is circumpolar in distribution and found in cold, brackish water along coastlines with freshwater derived populations (100s to 1000s of km inland) in Eurasia, North America, and on Canadian Arctic islands. In Canada, freshwater populations are found as south as the Great Lakes (i.e. the nearest marine populations are in the Arctic!). How could freshwater populations have become established so far from their presumably ancestral maribe populations?

2. High diversity of Oryx in Africa.

Antelopes of the family Bovidae include four species of the genus Oryx that show highly disjunct distributions. The Arabian oryx, Oryx leucoryx, is extinct in nature, but was restricted to a small portion of eastern Saudi Arabia. The Scimitar-horned oryx, O. dammah, is found in a broad longitudinal belt from Mauritania to western Sudan between about 20 and 30 degrees north latitude. The Beisa (East African) oryx, O. beisa, has a distribution restricted to eastern Africa from Kenya and north Tanzania north to Ethiopia and Somalia. Finally, the Gemsbok (South African oryx), O. gazella, is found in southwestern Africa from Namibia to Botswana and South Africa. This latter species has been suggested to consist of up to three subspecies across this range. Why might Africa be the centre of diversity of this genus? What can explain the disjunct nature of the four species?

3. Distribution of the tailed frogs (Ascaphidae).

The most primitive frogs in the world live in the extreme western portion of North America and in New Zealand. The tailed frog, Ascaphus truei, occurs west of the Cascade Range, from northwestern California north to British Columbia. They also occur in northern Idaho and northwestern Montana. In BC, this species occurs from Penticton north to Portland Canal (north of Prince Rupert). It may occur on near-shore coastal islands but does not occur on Vancouver Island or the Queen Charlotte Islands. There is also a disjunct population in the Flathead drainage in the east Kootenay region. The other genus, Leiopelma, consists of 3 (soon to be four) living species of terrestrial and aquatic frogs that inhabit both the North and South islands of New Zealand as well as some of the smaller islands.

NOTE: A RECENT PAPER regarding distributions like that in Ascaphus can be viewed by clicking HERE. It is from: Silvertown and J. Antonovics (eds). Integrating ecological and evolutionary processes in a spatial context. 2001.

Choose one of the distribution problems outlined above and using any available information that you find useful (see below), provide an explanation and/or hypotheses that could be tested to help understand the distribution of the various taxa within Myoxocephalus, Oryx or the Ascaphidae.Such information should be broadly based and include reference to major geo-climatological events (e.g. plate tectonics and glaciation) as well as behavioural, physiological, life-history, and ecological characteristics of members of the group being studied.

The kinds of questions that your project should address might include some of the following.

What mechanisms or phenomena can you propose (and how would you test for their effects) that could explain the disjunct distributions of lineages within the Ascaphidae, marine and freshwater distrubuition of Myoxocephalus, or the or the limitation of Oryx to Africa and Arabian Peninsula. What is the extent of the fossil record for your taxon of choice and what insights can it provide into the origin of that taxon and its distribution? Are there molecular phylogenetic studies of your taxon that can provide provisional time estimates for emergence of your taxon and how can this information be used to propose explanations for its distribution?

You might structure your work in terms of a summary of existing information and present testable hypotheses that could test different zoogeographic scenarios generated by the summary information. You should also include a section that outlines a specific research program that combines critical experiments and studies (including field studies if necessary) that could test the hypotheses concerning the major uncertainties about the distribution.

Some of the taxa described above might also represent important problems in conservation. Can your research into the zoogeography of the group that you choose to work on provide any insights into conservation problems for the taxa in question (i.e. how does climate influence their distributions and how could future climate change impact their long term persistence)?

The final project will represent 35% of your class grade.

First, you may work in groups of up to four and hand in a single report for the group. Although you can work individually, I strongly encourage you to work in groups as this should be the most efficient way in which to procede.

After forming a group, I have three pieces of advice: (1) start early, (2) start early, and (3) start early! The project is a lot of work and those who start right away have the least problems. The paper will be due Friday April 5th, 2002. The first thing to do (after choosing one of the three problems) is to plot the distribution of the taxon chosen on a current map of the world. Excellent sources for recent literature on the study group can be found (mostly post -1990, but some go back to 1982) by using Ovid, the journal database searching utility provided by the UBC library (it’s free!). Go to the library website and look for the link to "Article Indexes", Ovid is under "O". Some material is also available using the WWW and searching by family or species names. The database known as the Zoological Record is an excellent source that lists all papers published for each major group of animals (volumes sorted by Class) annually. Post-1996 they are all on CD-ROM, before that time there are bound volumes in Woodward Library. A good source for many general references in zoogeography can be viewed by clicking HERE.

The summary data will provide background information on the ecology and life history of the study taxa that can help you construct zoogeographic scenarios and hypotheses. You should also examine fossil and/or molecular data that can provide an estimation of the age of the study taxa and then plot their distribution on a world map for the appropriate geological time period. This should assist in historical reconstruction of the current distribution patterns. I will also post timely references that I come across on this page as well as announce them in class.

I would advise that you do some preliminary research and then prepare an outline for your project. Hand it in to me and I will provide comments and further suggestions for sources of information. You should think about handing an outline in sometime before March 15, 2002 in order to give lots of time for further research work and writing the final project.

The project should be of a length between 3,000-5,000 words. I think you can do an excellent job in somewhere around 20-30 pages including figures, tables and references. Make sure that you include a complete "Literature Cited" section and use standard scientific citation format (i.e. Grayling are beautiful fish (Taylor 2000)).

Also, make sure you have a clear introduction to your paper that states the overall objectives and scope of your analysis. I have included a "checklist" below for you to help when preparing your final paper. Ask yourself these questions (WHERE APPROPRIATE) to help make a good presentation in the paper.