Wayne Maddison

Professor and Canada Research Chair
Departments of Zoology and Botany

Director, Beaty Biodiversity Museum

University of British Columbia
wmaddisn [at] interchange.ubc.ca
+1-604-822-1545

David and Lucile Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering (1993-1998)
Associate and Assistant Professor, University of Arizona (1990-2003)
NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow, U. C. Berkeley (1988-1990)
PhD, Harvard University (1988)
BSc Zoology, University of Toronto (1980

My research arose from a fascination with the diversity of forms and behaviours of jumping spiders, which led to systematics, which led to phylogenetic theory and computer programming. My work continues to be both empirical, on spiders, and theoretical, on the use of phylogeny in evolutionary inference.

Spider Systematics & Evolution

The family of jumping spiders (Salticidae) includes more than 5000 species of varied body forms and habits. Their unique high-resolution eyes permit visually mediated predatory and courtship behaviour. Their best vertebrate analogs as predators are perhaps the cats — sighting prey from a distance, stalking, and pouncing. In courtship behavior, some groups such as Habronattus (above) rival the birds of paradise in ornaments and behavioural complexity.

Phylogeny of salticid spiders — The handful of systematists who have worked on salticid phylogenetics over the last century have begun to resolve the outlines of groups, but considerable work remains. A better resolved phylogeny and the corresponding classification of subfamilies and genera would facilitate efforts to discover new species and distinguish among them, and would also open the group to phylogenetically-based studies of evolutionary processes. A long term project of my laboratory is to reconstruct the phylogenetic structure of the family using both molecular and morphological data. Recent sampling from South America, Asia, Africa and Australasia have yielded a reasonably complete outline of the phylogeny, but continued sampling and data from more genes are needed to resolve the phylogeny more completely. Selected papers are:

Biodiversity discovery: taxonomy of salticid spiders — We have discovered only a small fraction of the species on Earth. The field of taxonomy continues the age of discovery by collecting and describing new species. I began contributing to this effort early in my career and continue through expeditions most recently to Ecuador, S.E. Asia, Gabon and Papua New Guinea. A public lecture describing an expedition and my perspective on biodiversity discovery can be found online. Selected papers are

Salticid evolution: biogeography, ecology — Our molecular phylogeny of salticids has revealed a surprisingly strong biogeographical signal: major clades are mostly restricted to a continental region. The New World tropics are dominated (in species count) by clades that are nearly absent from the Old World. Similarly, there are major clades largely restricted to Australasia, others to Afro-eurasia. Each of these clades shows a diversity of body forms, suggesting replicate ecological radiations have occurred independently on different continents. This provides an opportunity to study adaptive radiation and community assembly on a scale much larger (many hundreds of species and among continents) than well-known island examples such as Anolis lizards. Our first question will be whether consistency or contingency dominates: do faunas on different continents converge to the same constellation of "ecomorphs"?

Evolution and behaviour of Habronattus — One genus of salticids, Habronattus, has been a special focus of our work. The approximately 100 described species, primarily North American, include many with complex courtship ornaments and behaviours. A few are shown here. At the fine scale, we have examined the effect of sexual selection on differentiation among isolated montane populations of H. pugillis. At the broad scale, we have reconstructed phylogeny among species. Our eventual goal is to use the phylogeny to answer questions of behavioural evolution (e.g., why do alternating asymmetrical motions arise frequently? why are visual signals synchronized to sound production?) and of chromosome evolution (e.g., what forces affect repeated evolution of X-autosomal fusions?). This project is done in collaboration with Damian Elias (University of California, Berkeley) and Marshal Hedin (San Diego State University)

Other spider projects

Phylogenetic theory & programming

Phylogeny, the broad-scale genetic history of life, is a central historical framework by which we can make intepretations about evolutionary processes. Repeated patterns of change among species can suggest underlying evolutionary forces and constraints. Abundant sequence data has allowed the historical approach to be brought to finer scale work examining genealogical history of individual gene loci within or among populations.

Character evolution— I have long been interested in how knowledge of phylogeny can be used to infer the ancestral states of characters and correlations among characters. Selected papers are:

Diversification— A relatively new interest is in methods to understand speciation and extinction using phylogeny.

Phylogeography— I have been curious about the "ultrastructure" of species phylogenies, the histories of individual gene loci. This has led to several works on phylogeography and population genetics.

Computation and informatics — Theoretical work introducing new methods is not fully available to the biological community until delivered as tools. In some cases, however, tools go far beyond simply completing basic calculations. Visualizations and exploratory data analysis tools can provoke imaginations and help shape the very concepts of the field. These principles have guided the the first three of the following projects, done in collaboration with David Maddison.

Other phylogenetic projects — Art is not entirely absent from my phylogenetic pursuits, as in the case of phylogenetic inversions. The following are writings making general commentary on phylogenetic biology. The MacClade book has several chapters that amount to a partial review of phylogenetics as a field.

Publications

Papers

Computer Programs

Copyright © 2003-2009 W. Maddison