Category Archives: community ecology

There and back again: an angiosperm's tale

Posted on 19 Feb, 2016 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Eelgrass (Zostera marina) is the dominant seagrass in the northern hemisphere and provides the foundation of highly productive ecosystems that rival tropical rain forests and coral reefs in ecosystem services. Zostera isn’t really a grass, but a monocot, like a … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, community ecology, evolution, genomics, plants | Tagged , , , , | 0 Comments

marmap

Posted on 3 Jul, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

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 , , , , | 1 Comment

Old dogs, and 'carnivorous' pandas

Posted on 4 Jun, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

It was a good fortnight for large mammals! Two recent studies attempt to date the emergence of modern canids, and offer insights into the gut microbiomes of giant pandas. Ancient Wolf Genome Reveals an Early Divergence of Domestic Dog Ancestors and … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, metagenomics, microbiology, natural history, Paleogenomics, population genetics, speciation | Tagged , , , | 0 Comments

Rooting eukaryotes in the Arctic Ocean

Posted on 14 May, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

While the general consensus has centered around the evolution of eukaryotes within the TACK superphylum of Archaea (Thaum-, Aigar-, Cren-, and Kor-archaeota), considerable controversy yet remains with (a) the rooting of the eukaryote common ancestor, and (b) ‘missing’ links in … Continue reading →

Posted in evolution, metagenomics, speciation, species delimitation | Tagged , , | 0 Comments

Clonal conundrum, part un

Posted on 19 Apr, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Molecular ecologists are faced with a clonal conundrum when we wish to investigate the evolutionary ecology of clonal organisms. An attack of the clones is not something that should frighten one away …

Posted in Coevolution, community ecology, conservation, domestication, evolution, haploid-diploid, natural history, population genetics | Tagged , , | 0 Comments

The gopher tortoise gut microbiome

Posted on 14 Apr, 2015 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

A few weeks ago I wrote about a study on socially structured gut microbiomes in wild baboons. Well, now I’m here to tell you about a new study that examined the population structure of tortoise gut microbiomes.

Posted in community ecology, genomics, natural history, next generation sequencing, population genetics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 0 Comments

l'oliva di mare: disturbance and genetic diversity

Posted on 27 Mar, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Seagrasses are important ecosystem-engineers of coastal regions around the world. Previous work has demonstrated the correlation of high genotypic diversity with resistance (e.g., Hughes and Stachowicz 2004) and resilience (e.g., Reusch et al. 2005). In a recently accepted paper in Molecular Ecology, Jahnke, … Continue reading →

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Socially structured gut microbiomes in wild baboons

Posted on 17 Mar, 2015 by Noah Snyder-Mackler

“You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” Well, that old adage may still be true, but baboons certainly pick (up) their friends’ gut microbes. A new study by Jenny … Continue reading →

Posted in community ecology, genomics, metagenomics, natural history, primates | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Phylogenetic dispersion aversion

Posted on 11 Mar, 2015 by Rob Denton

How biological communities form and are maintained is a complex and fascinating area of molecular ecology. Gerhold et al. offer up an interesting take on community phylogenetics in a recent Functional Ecology paper that argues against the use of phylogenetic dispersion as … Continue reading →

Posted in community ecology, phylogenetics | Tagged | 0 Comments

How do you unite the stage and actors of the evolutionary play?

Posted on 11 Feb, 2015 by Rob Denton

When you are forced to give your one sentence, off-the-cuff response to “what kind of scientist are you?”, who do you become? A landscape geneticist? Community geneticist? Landscape epidemiologist? A new opinion in Trends in Ecology and Evolution by Brian … Continue reading →

Posted in community ecology, evolution, genomics, population genetics | Tagged , | 0 Comments