Every spring, nature enthusiasts are excited for another bird migration made evident by the countless posts on social media noting rare warblers spotted in backyards and high species counts on birding trips. And the excitement is warranted, as migration is an amazing feat, both ubiquitous and complex, requiring coordination of numerous adaptations for the birds […]
Category: Blogging
What happens when hunting history, whale culture, genetics, and an international collaboration work towards a common goal?
Right whales were given their name because they were the rightwhales to hunt: they swim slowly near the ocean’s surface and make predictable annual migrations to easily accessible bays along the coast. They were hunted to near extinction before international protections were enacted in 1935. As the species recovered, researchers have acquired a myriad of […]
Surviving cyanide – one path or many?
Cyanide is deadly – to most things. In high enough doses it blocks the body’s ability to create energy by interrupting cellular respiration. But even at non-lethal doses it has knock-on effects throughout the body. Despite this, a few mammals eat it regularly. In my last post, I described how I found multiple ways in […]
Surviving Cyanide – Part One
Eating is dangerous. Are you drinking a glass of wine? Perhaps planning pesto for dinner? The very flavors that attract us to those foods come from toxins plants produce to protect themselves. We humans know to the deadly ones. But imagine you’re a wild herbivore – every bite you take is a risk. Bamboos, and […]
Bioenergetic costs of asexuality – does the mitochondrion play a role in maintaining sex?
Among vertebrate animals, sexual reproduction is ubiquitous. But why? Asexual populations should outcompete their sexual neighbors (Maynard Smith, 1958).
Revealing ancient hybridization’s role in diversification
Hybridization between closely related species is a rapidly emerging field of interest for evolutionary biologists, and the more scientists look for signals of hybridization (with ever fancier tools), the more we learn that hybridization is the norm rather than the exception (Payseur & Rieseberg 2016). While young species pairs tend to hybridize more readily than […]
What can we learn about marine mammals from a liter of water?
With a new set of tools focused on environmental DNA, or eDNA, we can learn a lot! eDNA approaches are built on the premise that organisms leave a trace of DNA in the water they inhabit, for example, through sloughed cells, urine, and feces. We can, therefore, extract organismal DNA from a water sample without […]
Mountains high … valleys wide … can keep me from getting to you
The Sierra Nevada range towers over the Basin below, cutting the skyline with a jagged edge as far as the eye can see. Mountain ranges, like the Sierra Nevada, are symbolic of western North America and present barriers not only to most day hikers, but to many plants and animal too. For many alpine taxa, […]
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 […]
The difference 70 miles can make
Adapting to temperature is critical for any organism. Thus, many mammals, especially small, temperature-sensitive ones, have adaptations allowing them to modulate their metabolisms to adapt to their local winter temperatures, at an energetic cost (Chappell, 1980; Garcia-Elfring, Barrett, & Millien, 2019; Geiser & Ruf, 1995). The optimal metabolic modulation could be very precise, and would […]