Category Archives: natural history

The final nail in the coffin of Patagonian megafaunal extinctions

Posted on 11 Jul, 2016 by Patrícia Chrzanová Pečnerová

Are our ancestors responsible for Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions? Were the Ice Age giants doomed to extinction because they couldn’t adapt or is it human fault that there is no woolly rhino, giant deer and cave bear today? A new … Continue reading →

Posted in evolution, natural history, Paleogenomics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

New World snakes are "mimics until proven otherwise"

Posted on 6 Jun, 2016 by Rob Denton

Henry Walter Bates spent more than a decade living in the Amazon, having the sort of adventures that inspired generations of naturalists. His most famous and lasting contributions to natural history are his foundational descriptions of mimicry among species. The type … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, natural history, phylogenetics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Personal narrative of a journey from zoos to academia

Posted on 2 Jun, 2016 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. Back in February, the South Carolina Aquarium and The Center for Humans and Nature hosted the finale in the Holland Lifelong Learning series of “Why do … Continue reading →

Posted in blogging, book review, career, community, conservation, evolution, natural history | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The not so singular process of hybridization

Posted on 27 May, 2016 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

What, if anything, are hybrids? Zach Gompert and Alex Buerkle ask this question in a special issue in Evolutionary Applications. Hybrids occur when unrelated individuals mate, but how distant do the taxa need to be to constitute a cross? The varied … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, conservation, domestication, evolution, genomics, natural history, next generation sequencing, plants | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Ice-Age Euro-trips

Posted on 19 May, 2016 by Arun Sethuraman

Recent works that attempt to get at human migrations inside Europe paint a complex portrait of migratory events, admixture with archaic hominids, and adaptive evolution to new geographies, and a changing global climate. Analyzing whole genomes of 51 ancient humans … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, natural history, Paleogenomics, population genetics, selection | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Signatures of the reproductive lottery

Posted on 6 May, 2016 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

In marine populations, effective population sizes are usually several orders of magnitude lower than the census size. This difference is thought to be driven by high fecundity, variation in reproductive success and pronounced early mortality, resulting in genetic drift across generations. In … Continue reading →

Posted in evolution, natural history, population genetics, selection | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

What does the island fox say?

Posted on 5 May, 2016 by Arun Sethuraman

Small populations are characterized by large drift and reduced efficacy of selection effects, which result in fixation of both advantageous and deleterious alleles, accumulation of homozygosity, and often reduction in population fitness. What with plummeting mammal populations across biota, understanding … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, mutation, natural history, population genetics, selection | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

hyRAD and museum genomics

Posted on 5 Apr, 2016 by Ethan Linck

While the RAPTURE may have arrived, the development of novel restriction digest-based library prepartation techniques — and portmanteaus — continues unabated. In a paper published in PLoS ONE last month (and previously available as a preprint on bioRxiv), Tomasz Suchan … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, methods, natural history, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

The why's of sex

Posted on 25 Mar, 2016 by Arun Sethuraman

Sex isn’t quite what it seems – while superficially wasteful in an evolutionary sense (why inherit on only one half of your genes, when you can inherit all of them asexually, or why waste resources in mating when you don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, mutation, natural history, next generation sequencing, population genetics, selection, theory, yeast | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Annotations on a tweet-storm directed more-or-less towards Neil deGrasse Tyson

Posted on 14 Mar, 2016 by Jeremy Yoder

So, Saturday afternoon, while I really should have been working on other things, this happened: Hi, @neiltyson, I am an actual evolutionary geneticist who probably did inherit such a gene, thanks. https://t.co/B9ATLu357L — Jeremy Yoder (@JBYoder) March 12, 2016 What … Continue reading →

Posted in evolution, natural history, population genetics, selection | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments