Rensch-Lecture
Prof. Dr. Hanna Kokko
Natural selection should favor organisms that have a longer lifespan - or so one might think. In reality, there are a variety of life spans in nature. Using various, sometimes extreme examples from the animal kingdom, evolutionary biologist Professor Dr. Hanna Kokko from the University of Mainz will demonstrate at this year's Bernhard Rensch Lecture of the Faculty of Biology that a short lifespan can also be an evolutionary advantage. The lecture entitled “A long life: how desirable is it, evolutionarily speaking?” will begin on July 10 at 11:15 a.m. in the Aula im Schloss. <br/><br/> <h2>Bernhard Rensch Lecture</h2> The Bernhard Rensch Lecture, organized by the Faculty of Biology at the University of Münster, is a lecture event in honour of the behavioural scientist Prof. Dr. Bernhard Rensch, who died in 1990. He was Director of the Zoological Institute of the University of Münster and Director of the State Museum of Natural History from 1947. Since his 80th birthday in 1980, the lecture named after him has been held once a year, at which leading biologists report on key issues in their discipline. The department invites internationally recognized and renowned personalities as lecturers, who are close to Bernhard Rensch's wide-ranging scientific fields of interest and work with their own field of activity. <br/> <br/> All else being equal, one would think that natural selection favours organisms that survive for longer. However, nature shows amazing diversity in lifespans. I will reflect generally on why this diversity exists: how come an albatross female (called Wisdom) can still be raising young at more than 70 years of age, while a two year old blue tit is already older than average? Thereafter I will delve into the lives of an organisms where adult lifespan is a ridiculously short two hours. The insect in question, Clunio marinus, uses only one low tide, and they have a strong genetic preference for using either full moon tides, new moon tides, or both. In this case, conventional logic is turned around: using either tide would make total lifespan shorter, but by shortening the larval time in the sea, would also promote survival (every day in the sea comes with some dangers without allowing reproduction to take place yet). As a general lesson, intuition is not always a reliable guide to creating evolutionary predictions.
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