The evolutionary history of an organism tells a story, and the evolutionary history of a bunch of organisms tells lots and lots of stories. Stories about changing communities, patterns, structures and dynamics. Stories about shifting traits, sprouting clades, and transforming genes. Stories about the death and birth of species. I think it is our job as evolutionary biologists to uncover these stories, and to have a go at deciding which ones are interesting to tell.

Personally, I hope to tell stories of the rise and fall of ecological traits throughout evolutionary history. Novel features emerge, sometimes sprouting from a single branch of the tree of life and sometimes evolving in parallel across vast genetic distances. Other features vanish, lost to time as natural selection or pure chance prune individuals, populations, species or entire clades off the face of the earth. The structure of phylogenetic trees and the history of trait evolution go hand in hand, and phylogenies are natural tools and frameworks for the study of trait shifts and transitions. In this work I have found my niche.

Here in Lund I am engrossed in the endlessly fascinating Wikstroemia genus, shrubs of the Thymelaeaceae family dispersed across Asia and the Pacific region. My research focuses on the isolated island group of Hawaii, where the twelve endemic species display a variety of sexual systems unseen in the genus anywhere else in the world. It is the evolution of dioecy in the Hawaiian Wikstroemia my PhD project is concerned with, and it is my goal to determine when, how and why it evolved, if it did so once or several times, and how exactly the evolution of this most interesting trait can be linked to the wider biogeography and evolutionary history of the genus.