Driving up to Monterey from southern California is lovely enough to make me almost enjoy driving. Highway 1, just two lanes of traffic right at the edge of the continent, pays for its clifftop views of the Pacific with frequent closure for landslides. But even the more inland route of the US-101 highway takes in sweeping ocean views from Ventura to Pismo Beach, interspersed with and then replaced by rolling hills of oak savannah. Even when those give way to pasture and a distressingly large roadside oil field, there’s still the jumbled rocky towers of Pinnacles National Park beckoning (if not visible) from the exit at Soledad — and then you cut of the highway and wind through green farmland and increasingly expensive-looking housing tracts and golf courses until you arrive in the town where John Steinbeck partied with bums and dockworkers and a cantankerous marine biologist most of a century ago, looking out over rocky coast to the wide ocean.
That drive is something of a seasonal ritual for me, thanks to the American Society of Naturalists’ biennial meeting. ASN is perpetually trying to find an alternate location, ideally east of the Mississippi, to host their standalone scientific conference in rotation. But so far no one has come up with a better spot than the Asilomar conference center. It’s a former YWCA campground, with gorgeous Arts and Crafts halls surrounded by comfortable hotel-style lodging, built among dunes studded with Monterey pines and within earshot of the beach. Even in January it’s a great place to “go be biologists” between scientific talks, as ASN President Dan Bolnick exhorted everyone in his welcome address the first night. Deer wander through the conference grounds fearlessly, and warblers flit through the trees. Jogging up the beach trail into town I saw harbor seals, sea lions, and a sea otter; one morning I got out early with my camera and snapped photos of shorebirds foraging in the wet sand at the tide line.
The actual scientific content of the conference was up to the high standard I’ve come to expect — cutting-edge ecology and evolutionary biology, delivered in afternoon symposia of invited half-hour talks that everyone attends, and morning concurrent sessions of submitted talks with a comparatively generous 20-minute time limit.
Joan Roughgarden delivered the first evening’s plenary talk, walking us through her recent work translating population genetic theory to the coevolution of hosts and horizontally transmitted microbial symbionts — the holobiont. (The math leaves her somewhat skeptical that the holobiont functions as a coherent evolutionary entity.)
The first symposium, “Unlocking the power of genetic time series data to understand microevolutionary and ecological dynamics” featured some great examples of genetic data collected across multiple timepoints. Mark Bitter presented results from an ongoing experiment tracking seasonal adaptation cycles in Drosophila — in an array of replicate outdoor cages full of flies. Meaghan Clark described multi-generation pedigree data for estimating inbreeding in populations of Massasauga rattlesnakes. And Isaac Overcast and the symposium organizer, Brendan Reid, described a machine-learning analysis pipeline to model phylogeographic histories — which very recently helped identify shared postglacial expansions by nine eastern North American snake species.
The second symposium I confess, I can’t evaluate objectively, since I organized it. “Not ‘when’ but ‘how’ — towards a process-centered view of species evolving together” was the symposium version of my post from last year digging into how we understand what it means for interacting species to “coevolve”. (There is also now a preprint version!) In that spirit, I called in folks working on the evolution and ecology of species interactions from the widest possible array of perspectives:
- Chris Smith gave a definitive review of the current state of knowledge about yucca-yucca moth interactions;
- Amanda Hewes talked about convergent evolution in nectar-feeding birds;
- Georgia Drew showed us experimental coevolution in a microbial protection mutualism with Caenorhabditis elegans;
- Chris Carlson gave us theory of migration and local maladaptation in a geographic mosaic;
- Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt talked about her work reconstructing plant-insect interactions from the fossil record; and
- Colin Carlson presented new results about the network structure of hosts and associates like mutualistic or parasitic symbionts
The third and final symposium had less molecular genetic data than anything I’ve discussed up to this point, but included some very cool results. “It’s about time: Insights from the integration of age and time into ecological and evolutionary analysis” opened with Kjetil Voje explaining that by estimating additive genetic variation from phenotypic variation, it’s possible to infer genetic variation of fossilized populations — and then relate that genetic variation to actual evolutionary change in well-resolved fossil records. Lee Hsiang Liow followed that up with analysis of fitness functions inferred from fecundity and competitive outcomes recorded in bryozoan fossils. Those two talks pretty well collapsed whatever distinctions I might have made between “micro-” and “macroevolution”.
I also caught a bunch of good contributed talks outside the symposia. Maria Rebolleda-Gomez gave a great brief on her lab’s work towards predicting the evolution of microbial communities — which she analogizes to the microbe cultivation necessary for cheesemaking. David Hembry presented patterns of host plant association in a community of undescribed brood-pollinating Epicephala moths, with moth-host plant interaction networks inferred based on the moths’ phylogenetic differentiation. Jay Gallagher described a fascinating pattern of increasing morphological novelty in Hawai’ian cricket populations attacked by parasitoid flies that track their mating songs — which he described as evolution “throwing spaghetti at the wall” to find new adaptive forms. And Heather Kenny-Duddela demonstrated that plumage traits predict extra-pair mating success in female barn swallows as well as in males — though the plumage-mating relationships differ between sexes.
This was my fourth Asilomar conference, and very possibly the best one I’ve been to. Certainly getting to invite my own slate of symposium speakers contributed to that, but I think also everyone was in good spirits. The “vibe” was good, as one person said to me en route to checkout on the last day. The social events were fun and collegial, and I had some great conversations in the dining hall — particularly facilitated by the mentoring pairings set up by ASN’s Diversity Committee. The smaller size of these meetings means I actually talk to people multiple times over the conference, and between that, the communal dining, and the Asilomar architecture, it really has the feeling that we’re all at “science camp”.
Driving south after a morning on the beach with the sanderlings and a final breakfast in the dining hall, I was already looking forward to returning — to many of the same colleagues and topics, if not the same locale — two years from now.
