Congratulations to PhD candidate Stepfanie Aguillon for being awarded a prestigious year-long fellowship from the American Association of University Women! Stepfanie joins a select group of 23 previous Cornell awardees since 2004, including four past PhD candidates from our Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department.
Postdoc Nati Garcia has a new paper out in Behavioral Ecology entitled What have we recently learned about song learning and social interactions? Abstract: Vocal learning in birds is a complex animal behavior with several parallels to vocal learning in humans. Early experiments in the 70s showing that juvenile birds…
Like many professional organizations, the American Ornithology Society only works because so many people volunteer their time and effort. I am particularly proud of the many ways that members of our Lab group contributed to the conference in Anchorage beyond giving scientific talks and posters: Leo Campagna: Judge for student…
As part of our collaborative, NSF-funded project on cultural and genetic evolution in lyrebirds, lab group undergraduates Chloe Mikles ’20 and Kelsie Lopez ’21, joined by Kevin Macias ’21 and Eric Hughes ’21, are currently in the Blue Mountains of Australia studying the Superb Lyrebird. The group is working with Vicky…
PhD student Natalie Hoffmeister helped close out the AOS conference in Anchorage with her talk on patterns of genomic variation in starlings. Natalie’s work contrasts the North American starling invasion, in which there are low levels of geographic structuring, with the Australian invasion that is likely associated with higher levels…
Postdoc Sabrina McNew presented a talk at the AOS conference in Anchorage on the drivers of community structure in both birds and their blood parasites. Sabrina’s study looked at patterns across high-diversity sites in Peru, finding that patterns of bird community structure are most heavily influenced by environmental predictors, whereas…
As part of the AOS conference co-organized by Stepfanie, Jen, and Gemma, postdoc Daniel Hooper presented on his ongoing investigations of the Long-tailed Finch hybrid zone in northern Australia. Daniel’s talk featured an overview of the potential importance for speciation of structural rearrangements within chromosomes, a potentially largely overlooked level…
PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon presented a talk in the AOS conference hybridization symposium that she herself co-organized. Stepfanie’s talk addressed patterns of differentiation across the Northern Flicker hybrid zone, and her whole-genome approaches to discovering the specific genetic basis of the plumage traits that so clearly distinguish Yellow-shafted from Red-shafted…
Tulane PhD student Sarah Khalil presented a strong talk at the AOS conference on genomic work that she has done as a visiting scholar in our lab at Cornell. Sarah’s presentation focused on her explorations of the genes that underlie the orange – red variation in male coloration in red-backed…
Research Associate Shawn Billerman gave a talk on hybrid zones in the AOS conference symposium co-organized by other members of our lab group. Shawn’s presentation treated his studies of genetic exchange across coincident hybrid zones in the Great Plains region, in this iteration the differences between the high levels of…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon and postdocs Jen Walsh and Gemma Clucas co-organized a great AOS conference symposium on Lessons from Avian Hybrid Zones and the Maintenance of Species Boundaries. The symposium was filled with cutting-edge research presented by people from many institutions, representing a great variety of study systems and…
PhD student Amelia Demery presented a talk at the AOS conference in Anchorage on the genomics of biological invasion, in which she explored differences among house finch populations within and beyond the Hawaiian Islands. Amelia’s work highlights how invading taxa have variable demographic histories, and how they can become genomically…
Dave Toews gave a great talk to a large AOS conference audience as the 2019 winner of the Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award. Dave recently moved to his new position as an Assistant Professor at Penn State, but much of his talk centered on studies that he did during…
Research Associate Leo Campagna presented a talk at the AOS conference in Anchorage on how some populations of steamer-ducks have lost the ability to fly, whereas others remain capable of long-distance flight. Leo’s study combines a phylogenetic investigation of the history of differentiation and gene exchange among these populations with…
Postdoc Nati Garcia presented a talk at the AOS conference here in Anchorage on the processes of differentiation in two pairs of Empidonax flycatchers, birds that are notorious for being essentially identical in appearance yet different in song. Nati’s two pairs differ greatly in the degree of genomic separation among…
Congratulations to Jake Berv, who defended his PhD and then rolled right into the Cornell graduation ceremony. Jake’s work has focused on processes of differentiation in birds, ranging from recent patterns of phylogeographic differentiation in tropical manakins all the way to the deepest parts of the avian tree of life…
Sophomore undergrad Kelsie Lopez presented an impressive poster at this weeks Cornell Undergraduate Research Board symposium, featuring the work she has done under the mentorship of postdoc Daniel Hooper. Kelsie’s project examined the pattern of mitochondrial DNA variation across a finch hybrid zone in northern Australia.
Undergrad Chloe Mikles presented her work on the genomic divergence of song sparrows around San Francisco Bay at the Spring meeting of the Cornell Chapters of the American Fisheries Society and the Wildlife Society. Chloe’s talk was part of a mini-session preview of the joint society meeting in Reno this…
In June and July of 2018, Irby and a team from the Lab and the USFWS worked on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea, which is the only breeding location of McKay’s Bunting and by some measures the most remote location in the 50 states. Our Living Bird article…
Just posted on BioaRxiv, a pre-print of our new findings on genes associated with migration in warblers: Selection on VPS13A linked to long-distance migratory behavior in a songbird David P. L. Toews, Scott A. Taylor, Henry M. Streby, Gunnar R. Kramer, Irby J. Lovette Abstract Animal migration demands an interconnected…