“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 […]
Tag: JHered
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 […]
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 […]
Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from Helianthus annuus L.?
(feature image: The wild sunflower growing by the roadside. Credit: Matt Lavin from Plants of the World Online. Facilitated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.) Sabrina Heiser (@SabrinaHeiser) has written blog posts in Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Conservation Genetics and Science Communication courses at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is passionate about science communication, and, therefore, takes […]