A camera-trapped bobcat near Anaheim, California, where Fountain-Jones et al (2017) examined Feline Immunodeficiency Virus transmission. (Observation from iNaturalist)
The Harry Smith Prize is awarded for the best paper in Molecular Ecology in the previous year led by an early-career researcher. The 2018 Prize has been awarded to Dr. Nick Fountain-Jones for his paper ‘Urban landscapes can change virus gene flow and evolution in a fragmentation‐sensitive carnivore’ (2017). Fountain-Jones’s et al. addressed the impact of urbanisation on disease epidemiology in native carnivores. The study paired molecular epidemiology of feline immunodeficiency virus with genetic analysis of a native host, the bobcat (Lynx rufus). Despite working across systems and in organisms that are inherently difficult to sample, the study describes an innovative and rigorous application of molecular tools to extract valuable practical insights into disease dynamics in human-altered landscapes.
The conference season is almost over. There are still a few gems out there worth attending before school starts.
I just came back from the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Conference which took place at a UCLA resort in the mountains. This conference is rather small and intimate. It lasts for five days and is structured into early breakfast – morning talks – bountiful lunch – two hours afternoon break – poster session – dinner – late evening talks – partying and/or sleeping. There are no concurrent sessions. Everybody (~156 people) has the same schedule. Speakers are all invited and represent people from the whole range of different universities and colleges, genomics products vendors, and industry owners or workers. Everyone can sign up to present a poster. There is free alcohol ad libitum. Why is California still drinking alcohol? I guess it gives us confidence to break the ice. People were very enthusiastic. Everybody said they looooved it and would come back. What is it that makes a conference that good?
I liked the venue, the intimacy, great conversations, helpful comments on my research/poster, good food, sharing my room with a role model, good weather, and the outdoors. Also, the majority of invited speakers was female.
There were 36 talks and more than 50 posters. Let me summarize a few presentations that make a good fit for The Molecular Ecologist.
Katrina Sahawneh wrote this post as a final project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Katrina is working on her MS in Biology and her MA in Education. She currently is studying ER stress and pathogen immunity in Arabidopsis thaliana in Dr. Karolina Mukhtar’s lab. In her spare time, she enjoys drawing and painting.
Have you ever been in the middle of two people giving you the opposite advice on what to do?
Well, it turns out, plants have this problem, too.
Robin Waples receives the prize plate from prior Molecular Ecology Prize winner Fred Allendorf (photo credit: Diane Haddon)
Robin Waples, the 2018 winner of the Molecular Ecology Prize, received a plate commemorating the award in a ceremony Sunday at the Conservation Genetics 2018 conference. The prize recognized Waples’s extensive contributions in the use of molecular genetic data to estimate effective population size, gene flow, and population subdivision in natural populations and complex life-history scenarios.
Elise Keister wrote this post as a final project for Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Elise studies the impact of climate change on coral as a PhD student in Dr. Dustin Kemp’s lab. Elise completed a B.S. in Biology and Marine Science at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) and then was involved in a myriad of research projects ranging from damage assessment for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill to the impact of thermal stress on Floridian coral species. Elise is passionate about working with these susceptible invertebrates that play such a foundational role in coral reef ecosystems. She hopes to determine some mechanisms coral utilize to promote resiliency to high temperatures, as this will only become more common in the decades to come. Elise tweets at @elise_keister.
Looking around for a topic to write about, I found a recent paper in Nature that struck me for four reasons. The first is how it ties into my previous post about repeated patterns in evolution of sticklebacks in higher latitudes. This new paper uncovers a surprising pattern in marine fish biodiversity – the fastest rates of speciation occur in polar regions of the globe – not tropical waters. These results are paradoxical because polar regions also have the lowest species richness of fishes. The prevailing dogma is that lower latitudes harbor higher levels of biodiversity on land and in the sea and higher rates of marine species formation in the tropics have been inferred in fossil molluscs, plankton, and coral. However, the authors found the fastest overall rate of speciation occurs in the south polar seas within icefishes and their relatives. The mean speciation rate is over two times greater in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica than in the Coral Triangle in the Indo-Pacific, the marine region exhibiting the highest species richness. Though there is little overlap in species that occur in the southern and northern polar regions, the northern seas exhibit high speciation rates as well. Moreover, there is a high correlation between endemism and speciation rate. A notable exception is the Mediterranean Sea, which shows high endemism, but a low speciation rate. Clearly, there’s something about the high latitudes that’s conducive to high rates of evolution in marine fishes. How can it be that the tropical latitudes harbor the most number of species if the rate of species generation is so much higher in the polar regions? One obvious hypothesis is that the extinction rate is much higher at the poles as well. The authors were unable to examine extinction rates in this study, but mention elsewhere that their current work is exploring this avenue.
Finding new and engaging ways to communicate science is of paramount importance. But, how many opportunities are there to practice the art of communication?
That’s how I began the lead-in piece for a series of student posts over a year ago (see piece here and the student posts can be found here).
Giving students the opportunity to hone their communication skills is a must. They need to be adept at engaging with all sorts of people who will cross their paths … from policy makers to scientists in the same field to an interested person when you’re in the field.
Clichés are normally clichés for a reason …. practice makes perfect (or at least a lot better).
I’ve been lucky enough to expand my Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham since I last taught it two years ago this fall (time does fly … more about that in a future post on the meetings I was supposed to cover <<insert chagrin here>>).
Students in the first round were able to write a blog post about a topic of their choice. Each student that submitted the blog post to Jeremy and myself got them published. Not only did they learn how to distill the primary literature, but they each got another line on their CV.
Over the last academic year, I have taught an Evolution course and the revamped Sci Comm, in which grad students in both courses had the opportunity to write a blog post again. I was impressed with the quality and excitement in the first round. I also wanted to try to provide other opportunities for students. As regular readers will know, I have found my time at TME to be incrediblyrewarding.
Starting next Tuesday, each week a new blog post written by a student from my graduate Sci Comm course or from the graduate section of my Evolution course will go live.
There’ll be another series of student-written posts in the new year from my new Conservation Genetics course. I’m hoping this can be a series that will continue each time I teach a course with grad students at UAB.
The more I think about science communication … the more I wonder.
Is science communication a bit redundant? Should we not simply communicate? It’s probably a philosophical argument best saved for another day when a two-year review, a late piece for a society newsletter, and several manuscripts aren’t looming.
I hope you enjoy reading the posts over the next few weeks as much as I did working with the students to turn these into publishable pieces of science communication.
Do American scientists know that doing research in America is a necessary step for many scientists from other parts of the world in order to get a permanent job in academia in their home country?
Once in the US, these researchers face many challenges outside of academia that can significantly affect their survival and well-being, and ultimately, their scientific output. These challenges include health care, visa issues, housing, taxes, the school system, and child care. In America, people can easily fall through the cracks. Many other countries have a safety net that protects you while working at an academic institution. In the US however, offices will not coordinate and fix problems without the affected individuals being involved.
Pssst! The following text is only for postdocs. (I also mean grad students and visiting scholars).
The Evolution conference in Montpellier is over, and as the sun, wine and great science become a memory, here is my recap of some conference highlights following on from a great first day:
A sea of scientists waiting for a plenary lecture. Photo: Alex Twyford.
Sharon Strauss (University of California Davis) gave the ASN Presidential Address entitled “Diversity and coexistence in close relatives, and reflections on 150 years of the ASN”. In her talk, she discussed the coexistence of closely related plant species, and whether phylogenetic similarity predicts ecological similarity. Her work centres on herbaceous plant communities at the UC Bodega Marine Reserve in California and combines reciprocal transplant experiments with phylogenetic analysis. One of her main results was a curvilinear relationship in species performance and genetic divergence, i.e. that species perform best in sites of conspecific taxa that share similar ecological preferences, and in sites of distant relatives where there is less competition. She also showed rare species advantage, reproductive character displacement, and fine-scale exclusion within the plant community. The second part of her talk discussed the history of the American Society of Naturalists, a topic covered by the Molecular Ecologist earlier this year.
