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Category Archives: adaptation
Adapting to the new wave of isolation by environment
Isolation by environment, not distance, explains the genetic relationship between an avian taxon among Madrean Sky Islands, according to a new study appearing in Molecular Ecology by Manthey and Moyle. The authors throw the kitchen sink of new analyses at a combination … Continue reading
Sexual selection and population fitness
Sexual selection or non-random mate choice acts to ‘filter’ out less competitive/desirable phenotypes from a population. In the presence of small effect mutation loads, i.e. small fitness differences between a mutation-free population, and one with persistent deleterious mutations, sexual selection … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, mutation, population genetics
Tagged ecological speciation, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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Gene flow and Population Fitness
Fitness effects of gene flow (both advantageous and deleterious) have garnered plenty of recent press and scientific exploration. At the population level, the concepts and consequences are notoriously familiar. In the context of immigration, they reduce to existing genetic variation, … Continue reading
Sous les mers: cradles or museums of biodiversity?
While thinking about environmental genomics and writing this post on a recent article in Heredity, I interviewed Eric Pante.
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, Coevolution, evolution, genomics, interview
Tagged Evolution, genomics, Gorgonians, interview, seamounts
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Adaptive divergence in the monkey flower
Theory suggests adaptive divergence can proceed in the face of gene flow when adaptive alleles occur in areas of the genome, such as chromosomal inversions, that are protected from recombination, which can break up beneficial allele pairings. In their recent Evolution paper, … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, plants
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Plastic and evolved responses to host fruit in apple maggot flies
The apple maggot fly, Rhagoletis pomonella, is a prominent system for the study of sympatric speciation. Sister taxa in the R. pomonella species complex, the apple-infesting race of R. pomonella and the snowberry-infesting R. zephyria, have sympatric distributions and the fruiting time of their preferred hosts widely overlaps. … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, speciation, transcriptomics
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d(N)eutralist < d(S)electionist Part 4
Continuing our discussion of the neutralist-selectionist debate, recent findings by Schrider et al. (2015) bring us to the topic of selective sweeps, and their genomic signatures in a population. As we have discussed in previous posts, numerous studies (since the … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, mutation, population genetics, selection, theory
Tagged genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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How (not) to review papers on inclusive fitness
There are few evolutionary concepts as polarizing as Hamilton’s rule. Some researchers feel that there is no mathematical grounding for it, while others beg to differ. Yet empirical evidence in support of Hamilton’s rule is scarce (but check out this … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, population genetics, societal structure, theory
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l'oliva di mare: disturbance and genetic diversity
Seagrasses are important ecosystem-engineers of coastal regions around the world. Previous work has demonstrated the correlation of high genotypic diversity with resistance (e.g., Hughes and Stachowicz 2004) and resilience (e.g., Reusch et al. 2005). In a recently accepted paper in Molecular Ecology, Jahnke, … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, community ecology, conservation, natural history, plants
Tagged connectivity, disturbance, genetic diversity, seagrasses
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