 We embrace diversity. In large part, that's why we travel. We go and see exotic places where you can hear the smell, sight, sounds of new things. What I want to convey to you today is that as we travel, we take with us organisms. Basically, we're conducting a kind of giant dating game and seeing what's coming out at the end. What we're doing in our group here at UC Berkeley is trying to figure out how to maintain functionality and systems in the face of globalization. We get hooked on the idea of diversity from a very young age. Pokemon, you've got to catch them all. And always the best or the rarest, the ones that were hardest to get. We can all relate to the intrinsic wonderfulness of large mammals. For my own work, I focus on specialization, diversification of spiders, trying to see how they specialize, where they specialize, and what role they play in stabilizing systems. For example, here you see a spider that's uniquely adapted to low elevation forests on the island of Kauai. It's got long claws on the ends of its legs, which it uses to impale prey directly from the air. The point here is that these specialized organisms play a major role in the habitat they occur, but they need some level of isolation to keep their identity, to allow them to do what they do in their own environment. The problem is that we're no longer isolated. The world is intrinsically connected. There are shipping lines that go to just about every shore in the world. There are airline routes that are that are traveling constantly, connecting the most remote localities in the world, where there's nowhere that's truly isolated anymore. So what's happening is that we're basically taking biodiversity and putting it into a blender and seeing what comes out of the end. The result, in some places, it's fairly clear cut. You've got these pristine forests that used to cry out with with calls of cat birds and cockatoos and coals. They've given way to monocultures. They're quiet. And what about the stowaways that come with us? The stinging insects, spiders and sparrows that come with us and shipping crates and with our food and with our luggage. These organisms tend to be with us for a one way ride. They're not going back home. As a result, you find the same cockroach in Holland, Hawaii, Honduras. The same thing. Gorse. I grew up with Gorse in Scotland, the Moorlands of Scotland. It looked beautiful, but it's now rampant through Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and just about everywhere in the world. And the thing about it is that when these organisms reach their new locale, they often really like it. So here, for example, what we're looking at here is an insect that colonized Tahiti. And the thing here is it's not raining. What you're seeing is the insect is actually up in the canopy and feeding on the leaves. And this is the excrement coming down from the leaves, massive numbers. So what do we do about this? We can't stop people traveling. We can't get rid of the things that are already firmly established in these sites. What we have to do is embrace novelty and all of these experiments that we created in putting things together. We need to figure out what creates a functional system in all of that. So to get back to our dating game, we need to figure out in all of these forced connections, which creates a stable marriage. And we all know that stable marriages are not easy to create, even when it's just one-on-one and think about putting that on a global scale. A very complex problem. So what we're doing is focusing on islands. They're tiny, isolated, very simple systems that can serve as microcosms for understanding ecosystem function on a global scale. We've been working in really entire systems, entire ecosystems of insects and spiders and basically looking at entire communities across the islands of Hawaii. What we're measuring is diversity, abundance and interactions in order to see how these organisms change over space and time. We want to see what is it about the community that makes it more stable to intrusion from outside? What is it about which part of the community is more vulnerable and which place in the community and what dictates functionality in all of this? Basically, what we're trying to do is take the pulse of the system. We're trying to see what makes a steady state indicating functionality and what turns the thing out of steady state. And how do we fix it? So just as an example here, you see a very simplified network structure with the top predator, the shark here. Its effects are propagating down through the network so that you get the diversity of corals maintained in the system. What happens when you add insult to this in the shape of lionfish and in humans that are feeding on this system? The result is the whole network structure becomes modified such that the coral diversity decreases. The point here is that the network structure has changed and you can use the understanding of the network structure to figure out what's going on. So in all of this, what we're trying to do is figure out how to stabilize systems and how we might understand and maintain diversity for future generations.