Category Archives: conservation

It's all because of the holobiont

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

The state of coral: A mini-review

Coral reefs are one of the main harbingers of the climate crisis.  As such, there have been numerous studies, TED talks, Blue Planet episodes, podcasts, et cetera, about the state of corals. I’ve condensed a select few research findings for … Continue reading

Posted in conservation, mini-review | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Bigger bees bumble by barriers, end up with lower population genetic differentiation

Posted in conservation, population genetics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A Highlight of Molecular Ecology outside of Academia

I’ve recently made a career change. Actually, I’m not even sure whether to call it that, or the next step of a natural, if meandering progression of a scientist not on the academic career path. Even though I see more and … Continue reading

Posted in career, conservation, ecology, funding, pedigree, population genetics, quantitative genetics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Earth BioGenome: The launch of biology’s moonshot

The Earth BioGenome Project aims to sequence all currently described ~1.5 million eukaryotic species on earth (Lewin et al., 2018; Figure 1). The scale and scope are enormous, and it is hard to imagine a more ambitious but exciting goal. … Continue reading

Posted in conservation, evolution, genomics, natural history, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How island foxes are living on the edge

Back in 2016, Robinson et al. (2016) published a genomic analyses of the Channel Island foxes and they showed that despite extremely low genome-wide diversity, the island foxes do not seem to be suffering from inbreeding depression. Read the post … Continue reading

Posted in conservation, evolution, genomics, population genetics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Genomic signatures of ancient rendezvous and separation in elephant evolution

Evidence from various levels of the tree of life is showing that we’ve been picturing ancient encounters between related species all wrong and admixture events are probably more common than expected. Even rendezvous among primates, caniforms, and majestic proboscideans often … Continue reading

Posted in conservation, evolution, genomics, hybridization, natural history, Paleogenomics, phylogeography | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Climate change and genomic vulnerability

As the world burns and we barrel heedlessly into an ever-smaller and uglier future, predicting how species will respond to climate change will be critical for conservation planning. Intuition suggests most organisms will shift their ranges up in latitude or … Continue reading

Posted in conservation, evolution, genomics | Tagged | 1 Comment

Experimental harvesting reduces gene expression variation

Human activities represent unique selective pressures for natural populations. This is especially true for fish species where we routinely harvest individuals from the wild, i.e., through fishing. It has been recognized for some time that overfishing can result in population … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, conservation, evolution, genomics, transcriptomics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

#Evol2017 catch-up — or remember that time when someone stole your field gear?

To borrow from our lead in paragraph for post-Evol2017 wrap-ups: Two weeks after the closing day of the 2017 Evolution Meetings, the Molecular Ecologists have all dispersed from Portland, though items from the Krueger-Hadfield lab didn’t make the return journey! Still, the conference … Continue reading

Posted in blogging, community, conferences, conservation, fieldwork | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment