About the author: Marcella is an NSF postdoctoral fellow currently working in David Toews’ lab on the genetics of speciation and hybridization. Her current projects involve evolutionary genomics of adaptation, species divergence, and gut microbiome structure in wood warblers. Marcella received her PhD and MS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. […]
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Do marine species of a fin flock together?
In every biology textbook, Darwin’s finches remain a staple introduction to the concept of speciation and adaptive radiations. Considered part of the tanager family, these fifteen species native to the Galapagos Islands evolved from a single ancestor 2 million years ago (Lamichhaney et al. 2015). Since then, many examples of species flocks, or groups of […]
Will the South China tiger make its way back to the wild again?
Photo credit: Yifu Liu. In the provinces of South China, there once roamed a unique subspecies of tiger. The South China tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis) is ecologically, morphologically, and genetically different from other tigers. But, unfortunately, you will no longer find one of these tigers in the wild. All that remain are in captivity. The […]
A tale of two foxes: The genetic story of the Sierra Nevada red fox
Sierra Nevada red fox. Credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But what do you make when life gives you an unexpected immigration and outbreeding event in the middle of your long-term non-invasive genetic sampling of a red fox population that was previously believed to have died out? […]
Where do wood frogs go when there’s no wood?
Wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) common to North America. Photo courtesy of Michael Zahniser, Wikimedia Commons. Humans have fundamentally altered their surroundings for a looooong time. With increasing urbanization worldwide, we need to better understand the consequences of suburbia in order to manage particularly vulnerable species. Though wood frogs are found throughout North America, loss […]
The Dichotomy in the Diversity of Vertebrate Sex Chromosome Systems
A trio of Cyprichromis leptosoma, a cichlid fish from Lake Tanganyika, East Africa. Cichlid fish show unexpected diversity of sex chromosomes within and among species. This species has a novel ZW sex determination system on linkage group 5, one of three new sex chromosome systems reported in Gammerdinger et al. 2018. Photo by Ad Konings. […]
Pelagic to Coastal: The Expansion of Bottlenose Dolphins
We are worried about how climate change will affect distributions today, but how did climatic changes affect distributions in the past? Around 20,000 years ago at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the vast ice sheets that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere began to melt, opening up new habitats for marine species. […]
Well-Behaved Cicadas, Messy Symbionts: an Audio Story about Cicada Mitochondrial Genomes
Listen to the audio story: “One of the most interesting, pleasant places where I collected cicadas in Chile was this little hot spring resort town high up in the Andes. It was full of cicadas. They were so abundant, just landing on us—that was lots of fun,” says Dr. Piotr Łukasik. “[The sound of […]
In a naturally-replicated experiment, cacti and flies stick together
If you were to look closely at a prickly pear in mainland western Mexico, chances are you would find a population of flies—Drosophila navojoa, to be exact. Despite their colloquial name of “fruit fly,” many of the over 1,500 species of Drosophilid flies breed in everything from toxic mushrooms to slime flux, the bacteria-infected […]
Happy Darwin Day!
Today is Darwin Day! Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809. In 1859, he published On the Origin of Species, forever changing how we view the world. Forty-four years later, Darwin’s theory of evolution inspired the formation of the American Genetic Association. Then called the American Breeders Association, members first met to discuss […]