Brendan J. Pinto (he/him) received a PhD in August (2020) in the Gamble Lab. Currently he is a research associate of zoology at the Milwaukee Public Museum and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in the Kirkpatrick Lab where they aim, among many other things, to disentangle the selective forces […]
Category: SNPs
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]