About the author: Dr. Maria E. Orive received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently Professor and Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas. While at KU, she spent one year as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Orive’s research in […]
Category: Inbreeding
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 […]
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 […]
Mind the gap: why is genetics often missing from conservation?
In this series, written specially for the AGA blog, Dr Taylor will be exploring the gap between conservation genetics research and conservation implementation, showcasing some examples of how the gap is being closed for various species and projects, and exploring what it means to be a conservation geneticist in the modern sense (aka, why at […]
Is European bison really back?
Humans constantly interact with their environment. They modify habitats, transfer species from one place to another, domesticate some species while contributing to the extinction of others. To reverse the process of extinction, we’ve been reintroducing taxa since the 1800s. Reintroduction refers to the action of establishing self-sustaining and healthy populations of extinct or critically endangered […]
Reproductive Isolation and the ‘Hockey Assist’ – How a shift to self-compatible mating systems can bring about reproductive isolation
The first steps in the process of speciation are a bit paradoxical when you think about it…how does one freely interbreeding species make the transition to two reproductively isolated, independent species? More specifically, how do intraspecific mating barriers become interspecific? And why even are there intraspecific mating barriers? Well, that last question is easier to […]
