You've Come A Long Way, Baby! Predicting dispersal of organisms to remote islands

The Hawaiian Islands are >4100 km from the nearest continental landmass; the islands of French Polynesia are > 4800km. Yet, organisms managed to cover these huge distances to establish on the world's most remote islands. How did they get there? I will be looking at organisms that have naturally (before humans) colonized the world's most remote locales, and will discuss how understanding their dispersal mechanisms, their biology, and the natural environment, can be used to figure out the direction of colonization and how the organisms changed when they reached these islands.