Category Archives: primates

We can make academia more family friendly

Posted on 8 Apr, 2018 by Laetitia Wilkins

This one tickled me for too long. It became a serious itch and I feel I have to say something. Two weeks ago, Rebecca Calisi Rodríguez and a Working Group of Mothers in Science published an opinion article in the … Continue reading →

Posted in blogging, career, community, conferences, politics, primates, United States | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Phylogeny of the elves illustrates why we need to sample elf DNA immediately

Posted on 21 Dec, 2016 by Jeremy Yoder

Last year for Christmas Eve, Dominic Evangelista reconstructed the evolutionary history of elves and elf-like fantasy creatures in a tour-de-force of nerd crossover. Seriously, go read that piece if you haven’t. It has an alternate abstract in Elvish. As with … Continue reading →

Posted in DNA barcoding, phylogenetics, primates, species delimitation | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Gorillas (genomes) in the mist

Posted on 10 Apr, 2015 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Mountain gorillas are an endangered great ape subspecies that number around 800 individuals, inhabiting mountain ranges in central Africa. They have been the subject of numerous field studies, but few genetic analyses have been carried out. Xue et al. (2015) sequenced … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, conservation, evolution, genomics, natural history, next generation sequencing, primates | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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 , , | 5 Comments

All in the family: hierarchical social and genetic structure in the Old World monkey Theropithecus gelada

Posted on 24 Nov, 2014 by Melissa DeBiasse

Complex, multi-level animal societies have evolved convergently across many taxa but we know little about the mechanisms behind their formation and their associated fitness benefits. In their Molecular Ecology paper published online last week, Snyder-Mackler et al. addressed these questions … Continue reading →

Posted in community, Molecular Ecology, the journal, primates, societal structure | 2 Comments