It’s Evolution conference time! Evolution has long been my favourite fixture in the conference calendar, with its diverse mix of theoretical and empirical studies that span the full range of evolutionary biology. This year it’s the second Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology, which brings together the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Society of Systematic Biologists all under one roof in the lovely city of Montpellier in the south of France.
The conference kicks off with the ESEB Presidents’ Award delivered by Loeske Kruuk (Australian National University), with a talk entitled ‘Evolutionary dynamics and fitness in wild populations’. Studying quantitative genetics in the wild is challenging because many classical theoretical predictions don’t apply, and because robust inferences require long-term studies that genotype complete populations. Loeske discusses how her work generating a completely pedigree, along with large-scale phenotypic data, for the superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus), has given insights into quantitative genetics in the wild. Interestingly she shows temporal covariance between body size and fitness, but this is because body size is related to other traits, and therefore there is no expectation of body size showing an evolutionary response. She also shows date of moult is heritable, and suggests this means that ‘the early bird gets the girl’. She finishes up by saying that there are less than 10 estimates of fitness for wild populations, and that there are some consistent effects between species (like cohort effects) but lots of variation. I’m really looking forward to seeing the paper where these comparisons of fitness are presented.
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