Aisha O’ Connor wrote this post as part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Principles of Scientific Investigation course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Aisha is a non-thesis Masters student in the Krueger-Hadfield lab, and is interested in marine conservation and sustainable management of marine resources. Aisha tweets @Aisha_MOC. Imagine swimming 1000’s of […]
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 […]
About the author: Angie Bradley wrote this post as part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield‘s Principles of Scientific Investigation course. Angie is a student in the Accelerated Bachelor’s/Master’s of Biology Program at UAB. In her time at university, Angie has become passionate about genetics, aging, and molecular biology. She hopes to one day attend dental school and […]
About the author: Rose Ferguson wrote this post as part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield‘s Principles of Scientific Investigation course. She is currently a dual Bachelor’s and Master’s student through the Accelerated Bachelor’s to Master’s program at UAB. She is planning on conducting research in Dr. Dustin Kemp’s lab beginning spring of 2021. With COVID-19 safety […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
