  Coalescents with multiple collisions, also known as $\Lambda$-coalescents,
were introduced by Pitman and Sagitov in 1999. These processes describe the
evolution of particles that undergo stochastic coagulation in such a way that
several blocks can merge at the same time to form a single block. In the case
that the measure $\Lambda$ is the $\operatorname {Beta}(2-\alpha,\alpha)$
distribution, they are also known to describe the genealogies of large
populations where a single individual can produce a large number of offspring.
Here, we use a recent result of Birkner et al. to prove that Beta-coalescents
can be embedded in continuous stable random trees, about which much is known
due to the recent progress of Duquesne and Le Gall. Our proof is based on a
construction of the Donnelly--Kurtz lookdown process using continuous random
trees, which is of independent interest. This produces a number of results
concerning the small-time behavior of Beta-coalescents. Most notably, we
recover an almost sure limit theorem of the present authors for the number of
blocks at small times and give the multifractal spectrum corresponding to the
emergence of blocks with atypical size. Also, we are able to find exact
asymptotics for sampling formulae corresponding to the site frequency spectrum
and the allele frequency spectrum associated with mutations in the context of
population genetics.
