all Jonathan Losos stories

Biologists remember landmark theory

404132862 — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:12:41 -0400

Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.

Professor Lord Robert May of Oxford University said the word “ecology” — which describes the interaction between an organism and its environment — was coined just a little more than a century ago. By the 1960s, he said, the science of ecology was still mainly a descriptive one, lacking theories to tie together the observations by scientists in the field.

Lizards shed light on species diversity

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:51:48 -0400

Some people are drawn to majestic racehorses, melodious songbirds, or cuddly puppies. Jonathan Losos has had a lifelong love affair with reptiles.

As a youngster in suburban St. Louis, the Harvard professor was a “little dinosaur freak,” bringing bucketfuls of the molded plastic beasts to nursery school.

Losos’ lizards give evolutionary clues in island experiments

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:41:16 -0400

Tiny islets in the Bahamas have proven useful laboratories to illustrate natural selection’s effects on island lizards, which saw their legs lengthen, then shorten as ground-dwelling predators drove them into the trees.

The experiments capped years of research into a type of lizard called an anole on the Caribbean islands. The research, conducted by Jonathan Losos, the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor of the Study of Latin America, examined the relationships between lizards that shared similar habitats and characteristics but lived on different islands.

Losos described his research Tuesday (Sept. 18) during the kickoff talk in this year’s lecture series sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH).

Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:30:50 -0400

Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime - within months - as a population's needs change. In a study of island lizards exposed to a new predator, the scientists found that natural selection dramatically changed direction over a very short time, within a single generation, favoring first longer and then shorter hind legs.