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: Plants
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 […]
Three’s not a crowd! Does genetic variation across a tri-species hybrid zone respond to environmental differences across the landscape?
Hybrid zones elucidate the barriers to interspecific reproduction, the raw material for speciation, and thus are unparalleled resources for evolutionary biologists (Harrison 1993). However, when hybrid zones appear to lack reproductive barriers to gene flow, they pose a different set of questions, for example, what are the historical and contemporary factors which facilitate gene flow […]
Oversalted: How does a tiny floating plant cope with urban runoff?
Humans are globally redistributing salt. Soils (Rengasamy 2006) and freshwater (Dugan et al. 2017) are becoming saltier, while the ocean is experiencing fresh and salty anomolies (European Space Agency 2019). In North America and other temperate zones, salt is commonly used to deice roadways and sidewalks. This makes life much safer for people, but when […]
