Contact Information: University of Hawai`i 2538 McCarthy Mall, Edmondson 152 Honolulu, HI 96822 phone: (808) 956-9523 fax: (808) 956-9812 carlon@hawaii.edu

In the simplest terms, I am a population biologist interested in the origin and maintenance of biological variation. I use a variety of approaches to understand the evolutionary dynamics of biodiversity in natural systems. These include field experiments, molecular biology, and historical information gleaned from the fossil record. Most of my research experience is with tropical marine organisms, but I actively collaborate with several terrestrial labs at UH that work on the some of the spectacular adaptive radiations in the Hawaiian Islands.

Current research focuses on using DNA sequence information to unravel problems of population structure, phenotypic evolution, and to reconstruct phylogeny of closely related species. I have been concentrating a lot of effort on the process of speciation in tropical reef corals. The hard corals (Order: Scleractinia) offer many advantages to understanding what George Simpson called the "tempo and mode" of speciation. First of all they are diverse, with hundreds of species co-occurring in a small amount of ecological niche space, sometimes on one patch reef! Within species, corals are typically exhibit amazing levels of phenotypic variation, and we are exploiting "intraspecific" phenotypic polymorphism correlated with ecological diversification to study speciation in action. Second, hard corals have left us with an impressive fossil record, and we know a lot about their evolutionary history. Deep in time, this record faithfully records explosive diversification in the Jurassic, but closer to the present recent radiations in the Caribbean Sea have occurred repeatedly over the last 25 million years in the Caribbean Sea. Lastly, as an increasing number of Anthozoan genomes are sequenced, including the first coral, we now have the molecular tools to answer questions about patterns of gene flow, adaptation, speciation, and phylogenetic relationships that were mere dreams 10 years ago.

Speciation in corals is one dimension of my research interests, but other projects range from barcoding tropical fish larvae, to understanding the role of predators in coral communities. See the full list under Research. If you are interested in undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral research in my lab, please check out the Opportunity section of this website.