Spurred by several exciting findings in warblers and canaries, current lab members Dave Toews and Natalie Hoffmeister, and lab alum Scott Taylor, reviewed what is known about the evolution and genetics of carotenoid processing in animals in a paper just published in Trends in Genetics. Animals cannot synthesize carotenoids and…
Graduate student Nick Mason recently published a paper with lead author Cissy Ballen to examine the effects of a campus support program for underrepresented minorities, first-generation students, and women in biology: the Biology Scholars Program (BSP) at Cornell. Together, Cissy and Nick found evidence of a disparity in preparedness among…
Postdocs Jen Walsh and David Toews and Research Associate Leo Campagna are all currently presenting posters and talks at the Gordon Speciation Conference in Tuscany. They were also invited to a pre-conference seminar highlighting cool young investigators. This small conference, with approximately 120 attendees, is focused on the frontiers of…
Postdoc Jen Walsh and collaborators recently published a paper in Molecular Ecology investigating the genetic structure of the Saltmarsh-Nelson’s sparrow subspecies complex. Using a reduced representation sequencing approach coupled with morphological data, this study offers the first comprehensive view into subspecies variation within Saltmarsh and Nelson’s sparrows. The authors found…
Postdoc Jen Walsh and collaborators recently published a paper in Conservation Genetics investigating the temporal stability of the Saltmarsh-Nelson’s sparrow hybrid zone. By comparing genetic, morphological, and survey data from the same sites from two time periods (1998 and 2013), this study finds that Nelson’s Sparrows are moving further south…
We are back from two exciting weeks in Patagonia where Irby and Leo have led for the second consecutive year the field-course portion of “BioEE2525/BioEE2526 Ecology and Conservation of Wildlife in the Neotropics”. Together with co-leaders Roxanne Razavi, David Toews, Natalia García and a group of 12 Cornell students, we…
The well-read Molecular Ecologist blog by Jeremy Yoder — which is loosely affiliated with the Molecular Ecology journal — just ran a really great commentary featuring a new paper posted on bioRxiv by grad student and lead author Stepfanie Aguillon. The title of the original paper is Deconstructing isolation-by-distance: the…
Postdoc Jen Walsh has been awarded a $12K seed grant in support of her work on the genomics of parallel adaptation in salt-marsh-dwelling sparrows. We are particularly grateful to the Cornell Center for Vertebrate Genomics for this specific award and more generally for creating an interactive network of scholars from…
Graduate student Natalie Hoffmeister just returned from a pilot field season chasing after Imperial Shags in Patagonia, and she’s now even more eager to return for another season of sampling. This project may grow into her dissertation, focusing on population structure and salt tolerance in (Phalacrocorax atriceps) near Ushuaia, Tierra…
You have to love a scientific paper where the Introduction starts: “Birds fly, whales swim, cheetahs run, and amoebae ooze (not very fast) via cellular extension.” This paper newly out in American Naturalist comes from work that Lab postdoc Eliot Miller and Lab scientist Sarah Wagner did in Australia in…
Congratulations to alumna Hope Batcheller for getting her undergraduate honors thesis all the way through to publication! Hope’s project on interspecific communication among ant-following birds in lowland Amazonia started with a semester-long directed reading seminar class on the existing research about ant-following birds, when then led Hope to design field…
We are fortunate that Daniel Hooper has been awarded one of this year’s Rose Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Lab of Ornithology! Daniel is currently finishing up his PhD at the University of Chicago, where he is working with his advisor Trevor Price on the evolution of chromosomal inversions and their…
Big congratulations to Jake Berv for the news that his NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grant has been recommended for funding! Jake’s proposal is titled Surviving the K/Pg Mass Extinction: the genome as a life history character in birds and it includes innovative empirical and modeling approaches applied to the avian…
Postdoc Shawn Billerman has a new paper out in The Auk based on his PhD work with his advisor Matt Carling (himself a former postdoc here) at the University of Wyoming. The punch-line of this study has to do with their finding that Red-naped Sapsuckers are more aggressive towards simulated…
Our lab group enjoyed an all-day retreat today, with a break to attend the Lab of Ornithology holiday party. We covered lots of ground in discussing research, outreach, and professional development topics. But perhaps the most important outcome of the sillier part of the late afternoon was the anointing of…
Semesters always end with a somewhat bittersweet feeling, as classes come to a close and thoughts turn to exams and then to activities over the forthcoming break. My thanks to the 25 different people who presented in Ornithology Seminar (Bioee7800) this Fall, and to the many regular weekly participants (audience…
Congratulations to Stepfanie Aguillon for passing her oral A exam and thereby advancing to PhD candidacy! As is typical of this academic rite-of-passage, Stepfanie’s exam covered a variety of topics related (closely or distantly) to her dissertation work on the genomics and behavioral ecology of hybridization. It turned into a…
Warmest of congratulations to Sahas Barve–a stalwart member of our greater lab group–for successfully defending his PhD on Thursday!
Congratulations to Natalie Hoffmeister for passing her PhD candidacy exam (here we call it the “A exam”) in great shape on Thursday. Like all A exams in the Field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natalie’s was an oral exam that covered a wide (and unpredictable) range of topics, in this…
On November 12 Jake Berv gave the Larry King Memorial Lecture to a sold out audience at the Rochester Academy of Sciences Fall Paper Session, held at Roberts Wesleyan College. Jake’s lecture, entitled, “Surviving the Mass Extinction: The Amazing Story of Bird Recovery and Radiation after the End-Cretaceous Catastrophe” focused…