About the author: Christel Whitehead wrote this post as a project for Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Fundamentals of Scientific Investigation course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Christel earned a BS in Zoology and a MS in Biology from Auburn University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Biology Education Research in the lab of Dr. Peggy Biga […]
Category: Adaptation
Marching beetles – dispersal and epistasis
About the author: FRANK STEARNS is an Adjunct Professor teaching Genetics and a writing course on Science Communication. He is interested in adaptation and speciation genetics and in the history of biology. He recently finished a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University and he runs a Facebook page (Darwin’s Bulldog) that shares evolution news. […]
Bridging the conservation genetics gap to save Britain’s last wild-living felid
About the author: Dr Helen Taylor is a conservation geneticist who studied for her PhD in New Zealand, working on inbreeding in little spotted kiwi. She went on to undertake postdoctoral research on inbreeding and male fertility in passerines and, at that point, became interested in the integration of genetics into conservation management. After eight years […]
Quest for the wing-dimorphism locus in carabids
About the author: Zoë De Corte (she/her/they/them) has a strong passion for evolution, genomics and bioinformatics. They are a PhD candidate in the lab of Prof. Frederik Hendrickx (University of Ghent & Royal Natural history Museum, Brussels, Belgium) and Prof. Jennifer Brisson (University of Rochester, NY, US). In 2019-2020 they obtained a Fulbright grant and […]
A devilishly good example of bridging the conservation genetics gap
About the author: Dr Helen Taylor is a conservation geneticist who studied for her PhD in New Zealand, working on inbreeding in little spotted kiwi. She went on to undertake postdoctoral research on inbreeding and male fertility in passerines and, at that point, became interested in the integration of genetics into conservation management. After eight […]
This is their year! 2020 findings shed new light on sex chromosome evolution in skinks and their close relatives
Brendan J. Pinto (he/him) received a PhD in August (2020) in the Gamble Lab. Currently he is a research associate of zoology at the Milwaukee Public Museum and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in the Kirkpatrick Lab where they aim, among many other things, to disentangle the selective forces […]
What role do pedigrees play in the preservation of the Galapagos giant tortoise?
About the author: Angie Bradley wrote this post as part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield‘s Principles of Scientific Investigation course. Angie is a student in the Accelerated Bachelor’s/Master’s of Biology Program at UAB. In her time at university, Angie has become passionate about genetics, aging, and molecular biology. She hopes to one day attend dental school and […]
Habitat Fragmentation of the Catfish Hemibagrus spilopterus: Dammed If We Do
About the author: Rose Ferguson wrote this post as part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield‘s Principles of Scientific Investigation course. She is currently a dual Bachelor’s and Master’s student through the Accelerated Bachelor’s to Master’s program at UAB. She is planning on conducting research in Dr. Dustin Kemp’s lab beginning spring of 2021. With COVID-19 safety […]
Swiss army knife genetics: Does pleiotropy do all the adaptation job in Mimulus guttatus?
It is not a simple task to adapt to a new environment. An organism needs to acclimate itself to multiple new conditions, from differences in climate to novel parasites and predators awaiting for a newcomer. Such adaptive multitasking might take a long time to form at the genetic level and as a consequence delay the […]
It’s all about scale – evolution’s predictability (or lack thereof) across different spatial scales
In the late 20thcentury, a popular science communicator named Stephen Jay Gould asked a deceptively simple question: If we turned back the tape of life to the very beginning and allowed it to repeat from the beginning, would we arrive at a similar endpoint? In other words, how predictable and repeatable is evolution, and to […]
