The Hakubi Project

10th

The following 13 researchers are working at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University.

:Global Type
:Tenure-track Type

Short Introduction

How does phenotypic divergence and speciation occur in nature? This has been a major mystery in evolutionary biology. My main interest is the radiation of species and phenotypes via biological interactions, especially predator-prey interactions. Predation pressure from shared predator can lead to divergent selection in prey species in theoretical model, but this hypothesis has not been confirmed in empirical study. Several species of land snails in northeast Asia and their specialist predators, snail-eating ground beetles, can be an ideal model to test this hypothesis, because these land snails 1) are genetically close each other, 2) coexist in same habitat (no resource competition among species), 3) have totally different strategies against shared enemies. I am now planning to investigate the diversification of anti-predatory strategies on land snails using multilateral methods from field researches to molecular biological approaches. I believe the cross-sectoral explanation about specific evolutionary phenomenon from macro to micro will provide us the novel idea for integrative theory in evolutionary biology.

Introduction Research(PDF)

Research activity status (external page)

Latest News

• Nov. 1, 2023

  Assistant Professor Yuta Morii (Graduate School of Science) published a paper online. (Behaviour)

• Jun. 2, 2022

  Assistant Professor Yuta Morii (Graduate School of Science) published a paper online. (Population Ecology)

• Jan. 25, 2021

  Assistant Professor Yuta MORII (Graduate School of Science) published one part of a book, Natural history of Eurasia and Japan (Kokin-shoin).

• Jan. 22, 2021

  Assistant Professor Yuta MORII (Graduate School of Science) published a paper online. (Scientific Data)

• Oct. 13, 2020

  Hakubi Seminar Announcement (187th meeting)