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Category Archives: ecology
Some science books for 2024
The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. One minor personal accomplishment I scored this year is that it’s the first year since I started tracking, fully a decade ago, in … Continue reading
Posted in book review, community, ecology, fieldwork, natural history, politics
Tagged conservation, history of science, moral philosophy, natural history
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Don’t ask “When is it coevolution?” — ask “How is it coevolution?”
Ask me to pick a single word that describes what I study, and I’ll typically say “coevolution.” This is probably true of most evolutionary biologists who study interactions between species — plants and pollinators, hosts and symbionts, predators and prey, et … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Coevolution, ecology, evolution, mini-review
Tagged disease ecology, herbivory, mutualism, natural selection, parasitism, symbiosis
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The key to a productive ecosystem may be plant neighbors’ chemistry
One of the grand patterns across the diversity of flowering plants is that major groups of species are deeply united by shared chemistry, especially “secondary” biochemical products that don’t directly contribute to processes like photosynthesis, growth, and reproduction. Secondary compounds … Continue reading
Posted in Coevolution, community ecology, ecology, phylogenetics
Tagged plant chemistry, plants
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Evolution 2023: Highlights of evolution and ecological genetics at Albuquerque
Evolution is back, folks. That is, the 2023 joint annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution, held last week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, felt just about like its pre-pandemic self. The … Continue reading
Four science books for 2022
The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. Books occupy a curious place in my reading life. I read a lot as an academic biologist, from research papers to grant proposals … Continue reading
Posted in book review, ecology, evolution, natural history, politics
Tagged forest conservation, J.B.S. Haldane, paleontology, sensory biology
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Recent reading: 18 Sept 2022
Los Angeles doesn’t really get full-on summer heat until September, after months of building warmth and time elapsed since that last gasp of winter rains and spring fog. This year we (and most of the rest of the western U.S.) … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged adaptive walk, geometric theory of adaptation, GWAS, Linanthus parryae
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Recent reading: 2 Sept 2022
It’s the end of the first week of classes on my campus, after a spring and summer of more or less successful, mostly in-person conferences (more on that later, I think). I’ve got two big lecture sections of Evolutionary Biology … Continue reading
Revealing the natural history of yeast
The following is a guest post by Matthew Vandermeulen, PhD, at the University at Buffalo. Matthew studies the regulation of responses to environmental variation; he is on Twitter as @mvandermeulen. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, baker’s and brewer’s yeast, may be one organism that could contend with dogs … Continue reading
Posted in domestication, ecology, evolution, genomics, microbiology, mini-review, yeast
Tagged Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast
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Recent reading: 29 April 2022
How is this month already almost over? Four weeks ago I was just starting to realize that an unexpected, astonishingly good flowering season for Joshua trees meant I needed to shoehorn in some fieldwork, eyeing the data analysis I needed … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, genomics, horizontal gene transfer, journal club, microbiology
Tagged cuckoo, host-parasite, human diversity, rhizobia, Richard Lewontin
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Recent reading: 1 April 2022
April Fool’s Day is no one’s favorite holiday, as far as I can tell. I do remember a time when it was sort of fun to be listening to Morning Edition over breakfast and slowly realize that the totally serious-sounding … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged community genetics, landscape genetics, plant-pollinator interactions
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