Topic: human transport

Freshwater fish assemblages reflect millions of years of geographic isolation, producing unusually strong regional endemism. This seminar traces how tectonic history shaped those regions and how human transport and local extinctions now disrupt them. It examines the social drivers and ecological consequences of introductions, the resulting reorganization of global fish distributions, and the lasting effects of changes imposed within only a few decades.

Ports provide natural experiments in evolution because repeated introductions bring together organisms with different histories. This seminar examines how shipping and coastal urbanization generate mixed populations, dispersal mosaics and hybrid ecotypes. It explains how these processes help introduced marine species establish and can create ecological relationships and evolutionary lineages unlikely to arise without human transport.