If that sounds appealing, or if you simply hope to see more pictures from Hawai'i: stick around. There will be more of all this later ~ 🌿

I am also constructing a phylogeny of the wider Wikstroemia genus, hoping to 1. Determine the within genus relationships of the clades, 2. Assess the validity of the many widespread and overlapping, seemingly cryptic species, and 3. Biogeographically analyse how the Wikstroemia dispersed to Hawai'i.

My job is to suss out how the Hawai'ian Wikstroemia species are related, how they spread across the islands, what their population structure is like across various habitats, and how the gene trees of the sex-determining regions line up with the evolutionary history of the taxa we recognise today.

We investigate these emergent sexual systems through field sampling, greenhouse crosses, hybridisation trials, GWAS, and various other genomic methods for identifying sex chromosomes. However, we also use phylogenetics, biogeographic analyses, and population genetics. This is where I come in.

Since the Wikstroemia colonised Hawai'i less than 10 mya, several lineages have (seemingly independently) made the transition from ancestral hermaphroditism to dioecy. This makes these plants a perfect system for study of recent evolution of sex – a subject we still know surprisingly little about.

In Hawai'i we find a dozen endemic species of the Wikstroemia genus of flowering plants. Traditionally, native Hawaiians used the tough bark to make cordage, the red berries to decorate lei, and the pulped flesh to make a fish-stunning toxin to be dropped into tide pools.

Including a full house of evolutionary biologists!

And of course... sometimes you get to have a volcano in the background.

An (unprompted) audience member did it. Lucky for me.

Though it made me realise it actually would be pretty easy to arrange for someone to take a picture. You can even tell them when to do it so that you can be ready with a winning smile. I'm not at that stage yet, but maybe sometime it can happen.