Subscribe by email
Join 917 other subscribersMeta
Category Archives: natural history
An unspoiled frontier
“An unspoiled frontier, an escape from industrialized Japan and a chance to connect with nature …” or so says the Rough Guide to Japan (6th edition, September 2014). We had experienced a bit of the city-scene in Hakodate, but the rest … Continue reading
Posted in blogging, conservation, evolution, natural history, population genetics
Tagged Field work, Gracilaria, Hokkaido, Japan
Leave a comment
In the northern biosphere
As regular readers will know, I’ve spent the summer traveling around the Northern Hemisphere sampling the red seaweed Gracilaria vermiculophylla, an introduced alga in North America and Europe. I’ve rewound to the beginning of the summer in order to highlight our … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, blogging, community, haploid-diploid, natural history
Tagged Gracilaria, Hokkaido, Japan, seaweed, travel
1 Comment
Introgression history in sticklebacks and oaks
Speciation theory has many monikers for differential gene flow – migration, introgression, admixture, hybridization, secondary contact. As a homogenizing process, gene flow at large acts to reduce differentiation between populations post-divergence. However, selection and demography affect the rates of gene … Continue reading
Sweptaway – Part 3 – Adaptation genomics of White Sands Lizards
Recent colonization events offer juicy insights into the adaptive evolution of species in response to natural selection of novel habitats – however, they are confounded by demographic changes (eg. bottlenecks, differential migration). In a recent study, Laurent et al. (2015) … Continue reading
Small mammalian genomics of adaptation
While large mammals have had their day on our blog, two recent studies on small mammals reveal the genetics of size evolution in island mice, and differential introgression of mitochondrial and nuclear genomes in chipmunks – steps towards understanding the … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, domestication, evolution, genomics, natural history, pedigree, phylogenetics, population genetics, selection
Tagged Evolution, gene flow, genomics, natural selection
Leave a comment
Notes from Edmonton and #Botany2015
As noted previously, I broke with my usual habit and skipped the Evolution meetings this year. Instead, I attended Botany 2015, a joint meeting of multiple U.S. and Canadian plant-focused scholarly societies held in Edmonton, Alberta — I’d never been … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, conferences, genomics, natural history, phylogenetics, plants, population genetics
Tagged Botany 2015
1 Comment
Selection scans, and the genomics of adaptive/maladaptive introgression
Natural selection, and the adaptive evolution of hybrid reproductive incompatibilities post divergence are known to be major drivers of speciation. At the phenotype level, these manifest as fitness differences between introgressing populations. At the genomic level, speciation “genes” or “islands” … Continue reading
The Butterfly Effect
This might just take the prize for the ‘spiciest’ story in molecular co-evolution for 2015, yet. While a lot of the press coverage sounds like caterpillar thanksgiving, the science behind this study stands for the almost incredible power of molecular phylogenetics … Continue reading
marmap
A couple years ago, Benoit Simon-Bouhet ended up sharing an office with Eric Pante, then a post-doc fellow in his former lab. The two quickly realized they were in a lab in which few people had the expertise or taste for coding. Thus, on … Continue reading
Posted in community ecology, conservation, evolution, howto, natural history, R, software
Tagged coding, landscape genetics, marmap, molecular ecology, R
Leave a comment