
“Pretend that you are Charles Darwin and you’ve been dropped into Southeast Asia,” Professor Jon Kastendiek recommended to his students on the morning of the MV Explorer‘s arrival into Singapore. Kastendiek, a professor from James Madison University, took his Evolution class to the National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and to the Singapore Zoo. Their assignment in the field was to list examples of adaptation and convergence in the plant and animal species they would be observing.
Adaptations are traits that allow an organism to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. Convergence is when organisms that are not related to one another evolve similar adaptations because they live in the same environments. An example of convergent evolution can be seen by looking at how sharks, dolphins, and tuna all have adapted to a rounded shape because of the marine environment in which they live. Kastendiek tells the class, “This is not about knowing what the adaptive function is, it is about thinking about it. I want you to start thinking like an evolutionary biologist.” At the end of the field lab, the goal was for the students bring back their research to the classroom and form testable hypotheses about their observations.









