About the author: Alexandra DeCandia is a postdoctoral fellow at Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Her research applies diverse molecular techniques to wildlife conservation and disease management of North American mammals. Alexandra received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2020 and her B.A. from Columbia University in 2015. For her career, she strives […]
Tag: blogging
Nature versus nurture: estimating heritability of deer antlers and body size
Aaron Shafer is an Assistant Professor at Trent University, Canada. Their research uses genomic and bioinformatics tools to characterize adaptive and demographic processes in natural populations. Research organisms in the lab currently include shrews, deer, caribou and mountain goats. Lead-author Aidan Jamieson was an honours biology student who is now doing a MSc at York […]
Bridge over troubled water: getting across 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
An ode to the mudosphere
Field work has been cancelled the world over due to COVID-19. Over at The Molecular Ecologist, the contributors curated some photos from our exploits in the field as a nostalgic post to life pre-lockdown (if you have photos, be sure to send them to TMEfieldworkphotos@gmail.com). My lab spends a lot of time in mud – […]
What if by overestimating the complexity of the genomic basis of a trait, we’re underestimating the complexity of its evolutionary dynamics?
The genomic bases, or architectures, of complex traits are… complex. But what if by overestimating the complexity of some aspects of the genomic architecture of a trait, we’re actually underestimating the complexity of its evolutionary dynamics? This notion struck me when two things clicked while I was preparing a fellowship application back in 2017. First, […]
A horse of a different color patterning mutation
Connecting genotypes to the complex phenotypes they produce is a fundamental goal of genetics. Variation in coat color pigmentation, partly due to the relative ease at which different patterns can be identified, is one of the best-characterized traits at the genetic level, with examples from sheep (Zhang et al., 2017), cattle (Li et al., 2016), […]
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 […]
To band or not to band: what drives the expression of fashion accessories in female pipefish?
“Tale as old as time. Female chooses male. Male is large in size. Male has weaponry. Unsurprisingly! Male’s ornamentation. Male’s behavior. Female makes the eggs. Takes care of the young. Male and female roles.”1 But not all the time! 1Adapted from Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” written by Howard Ashman As the female is usually […]