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Category Archives: natural history
Long distance dispersal of modern humans outside of Africa
Long distance dispersal (LDD) has long known to be an artifact of human migrations out of Africa. However, the effects of LDD on modern human diversity, and models of LDD in human colonization are yet to be characterized. Using an … Continue reading
Anti-predatory adaptations in sticklebacks and butterflies
Two recent studies analyze character shifts in response to different selection regimes – (1) Mullerian mimicry wing patterns in Heliconius butterflies, and (2) anti-intraguild-predator adaptations in armor and shape of threespine sticklebacks. Hoyal Cuthill and Charleston 2015 Wing patterning genes … Continue reading
Clinal genomic variation in Drosophila species
Two recent manuscripts describe adaptive evolutions to clinal/latitudinal variations in Drosophila species to supplement a growing wealth of recent studies on geographic variation and adaptive evolution in natural populations of fruitflies (eg. see Kao et al. 2015, Zhao et al. … Continue reading
Genomics of domestication in chicken and cattle
Two recent studies attempt to understand the process of adaptive evolution in domestication and artificial selection by characterizing (a) sweeps, and their association with phenotypes in extant hybrid lines (Sheng et al. 2015), and (b) phylogenomic position of an extinct … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, domestication, evolution, genomics, natural history, Paleogenomics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, STRUCTURE
Tagged domestication, ecological speciation, Evolution, hybridization, natural selection, population genetics, population structure
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Three Views of Japan
By the time we reached Sendai, we were heading into our fourth week of sharing one tiny suitcase of clothes, while bags of silica were luxuriously spread across three large suitcases! Games of Jenga in the teeny rental cars were … Continue reading
Posted in blogging, community, evolution, haploid-diploid, natural history
Tagged 2015, Field work, Gracilaria, Japan, seaweed, Sendai
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On false positives in Isolation with Migration analyses
The IM suite of tools (IM, IMa, IMa2, IMa2p, etc.) are used widely by molecular ecologists at large for the analyses and estimation of ancestral demography under an Isolation with Migration (IM) model. However, these tools come with fundamental assumptions … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, genomics, howto, IMa2, methods, Molecular Ecology views, natural history, population genetics, software, theory
Tagged Evolution, gene flow, genomics, IM, isolation with migration, methods, migration, population genetics
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Along the Mackerel Road
We left Hokkaido and flew to Osaka where we collected our next rental car (our first teeny tiny one!) As our flight was delayed due to weather in Hokkaido, we decided to break the journey between Osaka and Obama (it … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, blogging, community, haploid-diploid, natural history, population genetics, speciation
Tagged Gracilaria, Japan, Kamiya, sampling, seaweed, tourist sites, Ulva
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On background selection in Ficedula flycatchers
Several recent studies (including those I wrote about last week) use genome-wide scans of differentiation to understand evolutionary mechanisms behind high or low divergence. However, there has been contentious support for and against these differentiation islands being due to differential … Continue reading