Hutchinson asked why there are so many species; Felsenstein countered by asking why there are so few. The rules governing the generation and maintenance of diversity – including distinct alleles, distinct populations, or distinct species – are still being clarified. One of my goals is to better understand how species interact with their environment in ways that restrict the natural spread and dispersal of individuals, as well as quantify natural patterns of dispersal that demographically connect distant regions.


I am particularly interested in how the environment can create asymmetry in gene flow, leading to biased introgression between species, the retention of allelic clines in low-flow marine and freshwater environments, and broad-scale geographic pattern of species and genetic diversity. A current collaboration with Jamie Pringle at UNH involves modeling the dispersal of marine larvae given information on both the nearshore physical oceanography as well as the population dynamics and life history of a species. Strong advection along the California, Oregon and Washington coasts should not allow persistent patterns of allelic variation, yet a significant cline is found between northern and southern populations of the barnacle Balanus glandula (Wares et al. 2001, Sotka et al. 2004, Wares and Cunningham 2005). We are studying how oceanography and individual fitness interact to produce regions of high larval retention, where more allelic - and perhaps species - diversity should be found.


Evolutionary theory suggests that polymorphism should be transient unless it is adaptive or maintained by some specific mechanism. My lab is also working on what factors contribute to a couple of polymorphisms in the seastar Pisaster ochraceus : the most obvious question is whether the brilliant color polymorphism found in this species is heritable or not, and we are also working on the characterization of an intron-length polymorphism that appears to be a homozygous lethal mutation, yet is found in moderate frequency across the entire range of this seastar.


Wares, J.P, S.D. Gaines and C.W. Cunningham. 2001. A comparative study of asymmetric migration events across a marine biogeographic boundary. Evolution 55 (2):295-306.

Sotka, E. E., J. P. Wares, J. A. Barth, R. K. Grosberg, S. N. Palumbi. 2004. Strong genetic clines in the rocky intertidal barnacle Balanus glandula describe geographic variation in gene flow. Molecular Ecology 13: 2143-2156.

Wares, J. P. and C. W. Cunningham. 2005. Isolation before glaciation in Balanus glandula. Biological Bulletin 208: 60-68.

Pringle, A., D.M. Baker, J.L. Platt, J. P. Wares, J.P. Latge, and J.W. Taylor. 2005. Cryptic speciation in the cosmopolitan and clonal human pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus. Evolution 59: 1886-1899..

Harley, C. D., M. S. Pankey, J. P. Wares , M. Wonham, and R. K. Grosberg. 2006. Color polymorphism and genetic structure in the sea star Pisaster ochraceus. Biological Bulletin 211:248-262.

Pringle, J. M. and J. P. Wares . 2007. The maintenance of alongshore variation in allele frequency in a coastal ocean. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 335:69-84.

Wares, J. P., S. Daley, R. Wetzer, and R. J. Toonen. 2007. An evaluation of cryptic lineages of Idotea balthica (Isopoda: Idoteidae): Morphology and microsatellites. J. Crustacean Biology 27: 643-648.

Eo, S. H., J. P. Wares, and J. P. Carroll. 2008. Population divergence in plant species reflects latitudinal biodiversity gradients. Biol. Lett. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2008.0109

Wares, J. P. and J. M. Pringle. 2008. Drift by drift: Effective population size limited by advection. BMC Evolutionary Biology 8:235

Pankey, M. S. and J. P. Wares. 2009. Overdominant maintenance of diversity in seastar Pisaster ochraceus. J. Evol. Biol. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2008.01623.x