Category Archives: community ecology

A bloom by any other name

Posted on 7 April, 2020 by Kelle Freel

Once a year during the spring, when conditions are juuuuust right, phytoplankton are terrible at social distancing. This annual bloom that takes place in the spring from 35º North in the North Atlantic and reaches all the way to the … Continue reading →

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FISHing for molecules, a link between form and function in animal–bacteria symbioses

Posted on 15 March, 2020 by Laetitia Wilkins

I am posting a blog post that was written by Benedikt Geier, a Ph.D. candidate who just handed in his Ph.D. thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany. In my eyes, these last couple of … Continue reading →

Posted in Coevolution, community ecology, ecology, evolution, genomics, methods, microbiology, natural history, Symbiosis, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Of microbes and whales

Posted on 10 February, 2020 by Kelle Freel

At the end of January, the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) journal put out a list: “Readers’ Choice: The best of The ISME Journal 2019” . I don’t know about you (my fellow scientists also with 35+ chrome tabs … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, community ecology, ecology, mammals, microbiology | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Loki and behold: one microbial culture that brings us one leap closer to understanding the origins of eukaryotic cells

Posted on 23 August, 2019 by Kelle Freel

What were you doing 10 years ago? Can you remember? Were you, perhaps, trying to sort out the origins of eukaryotic life? A pre-print (yet to be peer-reviewed) was released earlier this month by Imachi et al., describing a 12 … Continue reading →

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Snapshots of Biodiversity: eDNA as a methodology for species detection

Posted on 14 August, 2019 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Nicole Conner wrote this post as a project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Conservation Genetics course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  She is a Master’s student in Dr. Thane Wibbels’ lab where she is developing new protocol to detect diamondback terrapins off … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, blogging, citizen science, community, conservation, DNA barcoding, ecology, evolution, fieldwork, metagenomics, natural history | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

It’s all because of the holobiont

Posted on 16 July, 2019 by Laetitia Wilkins

It’s conference season at the Molecular Ecologist. I went for the first time to a Gordon Research Conference (GRC). GRCs @GordonConf are well known for their efforts to foster an informal and inclusive atmosphere where frontier research in the biological, … Continue reading →

Posted in Coevolution, community ecology, conferences, conservation, ecology, evolution, Symbiosis, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Luck be a Korarchaeota tonight

Posted on 8 March, 2019 by Kelle Freel

Some tiny microbes are making a pretty big splash, and not just in the hot springs they call home in Yellowstone National Park. Recently, there was an interesting article published in Nature Microbiology about some amazing archaea, which are generally … Continue reading →

Posted in community ecology, ecology, evolution, genomics, metagenomics, microbiology, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The (silent) thunder down under: mud volcanoes and the microbes that love them

Posted on 29 January, 2019 by Kelle Freel

One of the most recognized and distributed photographs ever is of the earth taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft 28,000 miles above where you’re reading this, and was named “The Blue Marble“. As the photo implies, our … Continue reading →

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Conference catch-up: The many colors of snow

Posted on 3 December, 2018 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

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

For flexible eDNA analysis, just capture whatever you want

Posted on 14 August, 2018 by Jeremy Yoder

Environmental DNA sampling for multi-taxa species detection (i.e., the inference of species presence from genetic material in the environment) has been a hot topic lately. Some of the most exciting recent work has used high-throughput sequence (HTS) to simultaneously screen … Continue reading →

Posted in community ecology, DNA barcoding, metagenomics, methods | Tagged , | 1 Comment