Applying for faculty jobs is a full-time job – The 'workload'

Posted on 16 Apr, 2020 by Kathleen Grogan

As a postdoc in the last year of her funding, I’ve spent the last year applying for tenure-track faculty jobs. I’m not ready to talk about the outcome yet, but I do want to talk about the process and what I wish I had known, namely just how much time everything would take, because forewarned is forearmed. I was repeatedly warned that I wouldn’t get much done this year because applying for a tenure track job is a full-time job itself but somehow I was still unprepared for the reality. I track my hours, so for all of you, I am reporting here how much time I spent on each part of this process. Hopefully this post will give you an idea, with concrete numbers from my own experience, of how much time you can plan to invest.

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Posted in career, howto | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Molecular Ecologist Podcast: #StudentSciComm, diversity within an algae bloom, the origins of a vital mutualism, and population genetics in continuous space

Posted on 13 Apr, 2020 by Jeremy Yoder

A new episode of The Molecular Ecologist Podcast is now out on Anchor.fm.

The Molecular Ecologist Podcast made it to a second episode! Thanks for listening to our first one, and for all the positive comments. In addition to our “home” hosting service, Anchor.fm, you can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed URL directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience.

You can also listen right here on the blog, with the widget below:

Here’s what you’ll find in this episode:

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Posted in association genetics, community, community ecology, housekeeping, microbiology, population genetics, Science Communication, TME Podcast | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Virosphere’s Own Trojan Horse

Posted on 10 Apr, 2020 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Melissa Walker wrote this post as a part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Melissa’s research focuses on the interactions between freshwater biofilms and the viruses that infect them. She is currently developing protocols for harvesting host-phage systems from stream biofilms in order to better understand the role of both lytic and lysogenic phages in the development and persistence of these important communities. Melissa completed a B.S. in Botany at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her career goals focus on bridging the gap between translational medicine and basic science research through novel approaches to and innovative applications of phage-host systems.

Were you ever required to read Homer’s The Iliad?

No need to break it out if you did (or didn’t). The Achaeans ended a 10-year long siege against the Trojans by placing a large hollow wooden gift horse at the city gates under the façade of concession. Meanwhile, their entire army hid inside, creeping out after the evening festivities to slaughter the Trojans in their beds.

The viral ecosphere (also known as the virosphere) presents this same Greek tragedy every single day, an ecological Trojan War.

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Posted in blogging, evolution, genomics, microbiology, natural history, Science Communication | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A bloom by any other name

Posted on 7 Apr, 2020 by Kelle Freel

Once a year during the spring, when conditions are juuuuust right, phytoplankton are terrible at social distancing. This annual bloom that takes place in the spring from 35º North in the North Atlantic and reaches all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Why is this relevant to anything? Well, to start, these blooms play a big role in carbon cycling and understanding them has broader implications than microbial community ecology (even though that’s the good stuff…right??). A team of researchers who live both near to and far from the North Atlantic have carefully looked at this phenomenon in those chilly waters to understand microbial community diversity and dynamics.

Figure 1. Map of the sampled stations in the North Atlantic and hierarchical clustering of the samples based on amplicon sequence variant (ASV) profiles.
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Posted in community ecology, ecology, microbiology | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Digging for Knowledge … and Nematodes

Posted on 3 Apr, 2020 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Hannah Oswalt wrote this post as a part Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Science Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Hannah is working towards her PhD in Dr. Chuck Amsler’s lab where she is investigating the effects of ocean acidification on macroalgae and amphipods around the western Antarctic Peninsula.

In early spring, a farmer prepares their field for the season’s planting. They till, then fertilize the soil. It’s easy to imagine how tilling and fertilizing, often referred to as soil management, affects the organisms that can be seen above ground. But, have you ever considered how tillage and fertilizer affect animals beneath the surface? 

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Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, Coevolution, community, ecology, evolution, Science Communication | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

For population genetics, continuous space might be the final frontier

Posted on 31 Mar, 2020 by Jeremy Yoder
Real landscapes rarely have tidy patches. (Flickr: Martin Hefner)

"All models are wrong, but some are useful," is a basic operational principle of population genetics. The aphorism is attributed to George Box, who cited the ideal gas law as an example, but it crops up in every attempt we make to relate on-the-ground biology and ecology to observed patterns of diversity in DNA sequences.

My first exposure to this issue was probably reading Whitlock and McCauley’s 1999 review of the tricky relationship between pairwise genetic differentiation and actual migration rates. Classic theory by none other than Sewall Wright related the differentiation index FST to the effective migration rate as FST ≈ 1/(4Nm+1) — but for that relationship to hold, every population of a sampled species needed to be the same effective size, and individuals needed to move between all pairs of populations at exactly the same rate. It is, to put it mildly, rather unlikely that any naturally distributed species might meet those conditions.

In the years since Whitlock and McCauley (1999), population genetics has accumulated a wealth of methods to provide more realistic models of population structure. But most of these still rely on treating populations as discrete patches linked by a web of migration — and while there are taxa that really are distributed in patches, environmental variation in the real world is much less tidy. A new paper published online ahead of print in Genetics takes a dive into the effects of modeling patchy distributions when your data comes from a continuously distributed world, and it suggests that this particular wrong model may be less useful than we’ve assumed.

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Posted in association genetics, evolution | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Raising boys – Not for the faint of heart

Posted on 30 Mar, 2020 by Kathleen Grogan

According to all of my parent friends, raising girls is quite different from raising boys, from the toys to the tantrums, the clothes to the bathroom habits, even for the most liberal, gender-neutral of my friends. In most sexually dimorphic species, raising boys is actually physically more costly than raising girls because males are larger than females. This trend usually begins at birth and continues into adulthood. In sexually dimorphic species, males generally fight amongst themselves for access to females during mating season, so size is an important factor for male reproductive success. The bigger a male baby is when he’s born or weaned, the bigger he is likely to be as an adult. Male offspring are therefore more energetically expensive to raise than females. In fact, raising sons versus daughters early in life can influence how quickly the mother ages later in life!

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“Of all the Islands in all the Seas in all the World…”

Posted on 27 Mar, 2020 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Ashley Jones wrote this post as a part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Scientific Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She earned a B.S. in Animal Science from Auburn University where she also spent several years working at the Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine. This past semester, she completed her M.S. in Biology at UAB with a focus on infectious diseases under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen Watts. Her graduate research project centered on the epidemiology of Lyme Disease in the United States. She is currently employed as a PCR technician in the virology laboratory at Takeda Pharmaceuticals where she is also enrolled in an MT certification program. In her free time, Ashley volunteers for local animal rescues and the Wildlife Resources and Education Network (WREN).

The study of genomic diversity lends itself to conservation efforts for threatened populations by providing information on which species may need intervention more urgently than others. For instance, when faced with a particularly harsh environment – such as in times of drought, famine, or disease – a population with high genetic diversity is more likely to have at least a few survivors due to their better-suited alleles. The survivors will then be able to pass along their “advantageous” alleles to future offspring. Et voilà!

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Posted in birds, blogging, Coevolution, conservation, Science Communication | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Co-opting responses for old enemies

Posted on 24 Mar, 2020 by Kathleen Grogan

On Friday, Shelby Gantt introduced us to an unusual type of parasite, the brood parasite! As Shelby eloquently described, brood parasitism is when an individual’s offspring are raised by someone else who incurs a cost to raising these offspring. The most well-known examples of bird brood parasitism are the cuckoo and the cowbird, but at least 100 species of birds (nearly 1% of all bird species) are obligate parasites on the nests of at least 950 or >10% other species of birds (Abolins-Abols & Hauber 2018). The costs to the foster parents include a reduction in the size and fledging success of the foster parents’ biological offspring and a potential decrease in future reproductive success due to the energetic costs of feeding the foster chick.

On the left is a red-chested cuckoo chick being fed by its much smaller foster parent, a cape robin-chat on the right.
Alandmanson/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Posted in birds, evolution, RNAseq | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Brood Parasitism or Adoption? Mixed Parentage of Brooding Damselfishes

Posted on 20 Mar, 2020 by Stacy Krueger-Hadfield

Shelby Gantt wrote this post for Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Scientific Communication course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Long enamored with coral reef communities, Shelby completed a B.S. in Biology with a certificate in Marine Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a M.S. in Marine Biology from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she studied sponge microbial communities and nutrient cycling on coral reefs. She is currently working towards her PhD in Dr. Dustin Kemp’s lab where she is exploring the relationships between climate change and coral microbial and algal symbiont associations. Shelby tweets at @GanttShelby.

When thinking about parasites, things like tapeworms or malaria probably come to mind. Brood parasites, such as birds (Davies, 2010), the Mochokid (Cuckoo) Catfish (Blažek et al., 2018; Sato, 1986), or even coral reef fish, probably do not come to mind. 

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Posted in blogging, Coevolution, DNA barcoding, fieldwork | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment