Category Archives: adaptation

The Carnivorous Rodents of Southeast Asia

Posted on 15 Feb, 2016 by Bryan McLean

Whoa, Wallace. There be carnivorous rats on those islands. Sixty-two species, to be exact, across the broader Indo-Australian Archipelago. Among them are small- and large-bodied rats, worm-eaters with elongated snouts (“vermivores”), and even amphibious forms (Fig. 1), and they are … Continue reading →

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Supergenes and Sparrows with Four Sexes

Posted on 10 Feb, 2016 by Ethan Linck

Supergenes are groups of tightly-linked genes that influence suites of traits relevant to fitness. While long a fixture of evolutionary genetics theory, their role in empirical studies of non-model organisms has been relatively limited, due to limitations in both our … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, horizontal gene transfer, natural history, population genetics, selection | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

How the White Sands lizards lost their stripes

Posted on 9 Feb, 2016 by Katie Everson

In molecular ecology, most of us work with study systems that are messy, uncooperative, or just plain difficult (note the fecal samples incubating on my lab bench). What I wouldn’t give for a nice, elegant study system — like the … Continue reading →

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Macroalgal miscellany

Posted on 22 Jan, 2016 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

It’s been a jam-packed week and I’ve found myself at Friday. Grandiose plans for a post continuing the series on clonality (see here and here) did not come to fruition. But, I was saved with a new article that tumbled … Continue reading →

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Genomics of Hybridization – Part 1

Posted on 21 Jan, 2016 by Arun Sethuraman

In a series of articles, I will discuss recent advances in hybridization genomics – the fundamentals of adaptive introgression, “islands of speciation”, differential gene flow, and linked selection have been discussed in my previous posts (here, here, and also at … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, methods, natural history, next generation sequencing, pedigree, phylogenetics, plants, population genetics, RNAseq, software, speciation, species delimitation, STRUCTURE, theory, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Earthquakes and rapid evolution

Posted on 7 Jan, 2016 by Arun Sethuraman

The 1964 Alaskan earthquake was landscape-altering in creating/uplifting numerous islands in the Gulf of Alaska, providing an ideal system to study adaptive evolution of diversification in affected species – the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) being a widely studied example. In … Continue reading →

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It's not you, it's my genes: Sexual fidelity tradeoffs in prairie voles

Posted on 15 Dec, 2015 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

Many of you may probably already know the monogamous prairie vole as the yin to the promiscuous montane vole’s yang. Prairie voles are socially monogamous, which is an extremely rare trait among mammals. This trait has made the prairie vole … Continue reading →

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Pre-adapted algal ancestors colonized land

Posted on 7 Dec, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

The colonization of land by plants 450 Mya marked a major transition on Earth and was one of the critical events that led to the emergence of extant terrestrial ecosystems. Chief among the challenges the terrestrial environment presented for these … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, Coevolution, evolution, genomics, haploid-diploid, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics, plants, transcriptomics | Tagged | Leave a comment

The scent of home

Posted on 3 Dec, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

We decided to divide and conquere the west coast of North America in search of more populations of Gracilaria vermiculophylla, as if we didn’t already have enough by Midsummer’s Eve! I headed to my home state – California. I was able to sneak … Continue reading →

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Isolation by Aesop's Fable in NYC mice

Posted on 2 Dec, 2015 by Rob Denton

The story goes like this: Town Mouse goes to visit his friend in the country. Town Mouse looks down his long nose at the food offered by Country Mouse, so he brings Country Mouse back to the city for a … Continue reading →

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