Say you are studying a population of anadromous fish. These fish live in the ocean and swim upriver to spawn, with each fish returning to the river in which it hatched. The different rivers wind up containing separate subpopulations, as fish from different rivers never interbreed. How can these distinct subpopulations be recognized when the […]
Category: Blogging
Genetic and epigenetic relationships across evolutionary and ecological timescales in Icelandic stickleback
The ability of organisms to colonize or adapt to new and changing environments is of critical interest in biology, especially considering the threats and advances of human-induced environmental change. Certain traits may play a key role in determining population persistence or decline in the face of climate change, habitat fragmentation, and the like. In the […]
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 […]
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 […]