Description

UNM Biology 402/502 // UNM Art Studio 389/429/529 // UHON 402
Joseph Cook // Szu-Han Ho

Space for posting thoughts, ideas, references, resources, and works. The theme of our seminar and workshop series is "Morphology and Geographic Variation." With the natural history collection as our starting point, we'll hear from scientists, artists, designers, programmers, musicians, and more on place-based study. Part of AIM-UP, an NSF Research Coordination Network.

The Relationship between Geographic Barriers and Divergence

Click to download pdf (2.3 MB) view interactive in Adobe Acrobat

Katie Carillo, Lauren Davis, Candice Espinoza, and Antonio Marquez (UNM)



The primary focus of our book is to project possible effects of a manmade barrier on speciation by first understanding the impact of a historical natural barrier. This will be achieved by utilizing museum specimens of the resulting speciation event as an example. We will begin with an illustration of two morphologically unique squirrels being separated by the Grand Canyon. We will then provide background information on both the squirrels illustrated and the canyon itself. We will mention several types of barriers and discuss the importance of mobility when crossing barriers of different types. This will allow us to transition into discussing the effects of gene flow on population similarity and the four modes of speciation. We will then talk about a manmade barrier that is currently under construction and speculate the effects on two different types of animals. At the end of the book we will provide information about the data banks used. We will also provide other examples that need to be investigated by the students. Illustrations will be distributed throughout the book to act as visual aids when discussing scientific principles.