The Winter Meeting of The Washington Area Marine Aquarist Society (WAMAS) will be on Saturday, Jan 21, 2012 from 1:00-5:00 p.m. at Kilmer Middle School.
Special Guest and Highlights:
Speaker: Luiz Rocha from the Cal Acadamy of Sciences
Bio: Dr. Rocha has earned his PhD from the University of Florida and a post-doc from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. His current position is curator of fishes at the California Academy of Sciences. Research interests and experience are centered on the evolution, phylogeography (or the geographic distribution of genetic lineages), biogeography, systematics and community and behavioral ecology of coral reef fishes. He frequently tries to combine these fields, invoking ecology to help explain evolutionary patterns and using molecular tools to test biogeographic and systematic hypotheses. The overall objective of this interdisciplinary research is to test existing hypotheses (and propose new ones) about what generates and maintains the extremely high biodiversity in tropical coral reefs.
