1. Distribution of the whitebait, Galaxias maculatus

The smelts, family Osmeridae (Pisces) are temperate fishes found in marine and freshwaters both in the northern and southern hemispheres. The whitebait smelt is a euryhaline, diadromous fish native to the southern hemisphere. It is found in southern Australia and Tazmania, New Zealand, South America and South Africa. It is a small fish (100 mm or less), but has a range in coastal waters that extends across the entire southern extreme of the Southern Hemisphere.Is there current distribution a function of recent and/or ongoing dispersal or could they represent part of an ancient Gondwanan fauna?

2. Distribution of Lemurs.

Lemurs are a group of prosimian primates (about 50 species) that are endemic to Madagascar and the nearby Comores Islands off east Africa. They have reached high diversity on Madagascar and display some traits that are quite distinct from related prosimians in mainland areas (i.e., large body size and diurnal habits). What are lemurs restricted to Madagascar and the small Comorean archipelago? Did they originate there or are they remnants of a once wider distribution?

3. Distribution of the Alcidae.

The avian family Alcidae have a curious distribution. The auks, puffins, murres, and guillemots are broadly-distributed throughout the northern hemisphere. Although they are strong flyers throughout their distribution the group as a whole have not managed to colonize ecologically suiotable habitats in the southern hemisphere. Why are these birds restricted to the Northern Hemisphere? Given that they are clearly capable of widespread dispersal within hemispheres, why have they not be able to disperse between hemispheres? Are the reasons mostly ecological or historical?

Project:

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 G. maculatus, the lemurs or the alcids.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 G. maculatus, the endemism of lemurs, or the limitation of Alcidae to the northern hemisphere? 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 assess 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 the last day of classes, Thursday April 8th at 5:00 PM. 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-1974 they are available electronically on the UBC Library Databases. Earlier issues can be found in 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 Feb. 29, 2004 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.