Category Archives: speciation

The crows have eyes — but not only for members of their own species

If you are a moderately bird-interested person who’s spent much time in Seattle or Vancouver, you’ve probably had a version of the following conversation with a less bird-interested friend or family member from out of town, after one of you … Continue reading

Posted in birds, phylogeography, species delimitation | Tagged | 1 Comment

Hybridization in the depths of the last glacial period created a world-conquering clover

Plants’ flexibility with the structure of their genome — able to cope with proliferating transposons, whole-genome duplications, or even acquisition of complete sets of chromosomes from another species — is a big source of evolutionary novelty. Duplication of a single gene … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, hybridization, speciation | Tagged | 1 Comment

Conference catch-up: The many colors of snow

Red snow … watermelon snow … green snow … did you know that snow came in so many different colors? I had never heard of watermelon ice (#🍉❄) until a talk given by Robin Kodner from Western Washington University at … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, citizen science, community ecology, evolution, fieldwork, mating system, microbiology, natural history, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Evolution 2018: assortative mating, combinatorial speciation and genome dynamics

The Evolution conference in Montpellier is over, and as the sun, wine and great science become a memory, here is my recap of some conference highlights following on from a great first day: Sharon Strauss (University of California Davis) gave … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, conferences, evolution, genomics, natural history, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics, population genetics, speciation | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Evolution 2018 Day 1: From genomics in the wild, to new models of selection

It’s Evolution conference time! Evolution has long been my favourite fixture in the conference calendar, with its diverse mix of theoretical and empirical studies that span the full range of evolutionary biology. This year it’s the second Joint Congress on … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, community, conferences, evolution, genomics, population genetics, speciation, theory | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Chromosomal inversions and the maintenance of species barriers

Chromosomal inversions have long fascinated evolutionary biologists for their role in adaptation and speciation. These structural variants are abundant in natural populations and can have diverse evolutionary consequences. They can cause reproductive isolation through hybrid sterility or protect sets of … Continue reading

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Walking, galloping, and sauntering towards genetic differentiation

“This validates, at a major scale (across all vertebrates), what a handful of studies have found within narrow taxonomic groups…” My citation manager has a special folder—elegantly named “TEACHING??”—where papers get stored for eventual use in a classroom. These papers tend to … Continue reading

Posted in comparative phylogeography, natural history, speciation | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

What’s in a name? A review of cryptic species and species concepts

It is a contentious can of worms. Species concepts are both essential to understand and at the same time incredibly difficult to define. Species names allow us to discuss fundamental units of biodiversity in any ecosystem and study genome evolution, … Continue reading

Posted in evolution, Molecular Ecology, the journal, speciation, species delimitation | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

DNA sequence data shows that this "living fossil" isn't so fossilized after all

Living fossils are a tricky concept for evolutionary biology. In principle it seems simple: living organisms that closely resemble creatures seen in the fossil record going back millions of years. Usually they’re a single representative of a fossil record containing … Continue reading

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The genomic architecture of ecological speciation

Speciation reshapes the ways genetic diversity is distributed in the genome — it’s been said that the establishment of reproductive isolation is essentially the evolution of genome-wide linkage disequilibrium. The “genomic islands of speciation” model of ecological isolation imagines genome-wide … Continue reading

Posted in association genetics, linkage mapping, selection, speciation | Tagged | Leave a comment