How to prepare for a trip to Patagonia: (1) get Leo (from Argentina) to agree to be master chef/jefe de asado; (2) obtain two sheep; (3) watch Leo chase sheep around pasture; (4) humanely dispatch and partly deconstruct said sheep; (4) invite the lab group plus 100 other people over…
Here is just a small sample of links to third-party commentaries and articles on Jake’s avian phylogeny study: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15638.html http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/07/us-science-birds-idUSKCN0S124U20151007 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15638.html http://www.voanews.com/content/scientists-unveil-comprehensive-bird-family-tree/2995915.html
Congratulations to grad student Jake Berv and his co-authors for their important paper on the avian tree of life, which came out this week in Nature! The paper is open-access and the link is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15697.html A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing Although reconstruction of…
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute Seminar: Scott was in Washington DC this Friday to give a seminar as part of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute Seminar Series. His seminar, titled “Chickadees and climate change: Ecological and evolutionary insights from common backyard birds” highlighted some of the work he has been doing…
Congrats to postdoc Leo Campagna for making the cover of Molecular Ecology with his most recent research paper on seedeaters!
Our crew at AOU: Scott, David, Leo, and Nick:
Postdoc David Toews gave his talk at AOU/COS on Extensive biogeographic introgression and weak genomic divergence between phenotypically distinct wood warblers. This collaborative project is using new genomic tools to better understand the dynamics of hybridization between golden-winged and blue-winged warblers. The new data confirm that hybridization is likely facilitating…
Postdoc Scott Taylor just gave a talk at AOU/COS on A comparative transcriptomic approach for understanding low hybrid fitness in chickadees. Summary: Comparing the transcriptomes of Black-capped, Carolina, and Mountain chickadees has provided support for our hypothesis that a breakdown in aerobic capacity in hybrid chickadees may be the underlying…
Postdoc Leo Campagna presented his work at the AOU/COS conference in Norman, Oklahoma. Leo uses genomic tools to understand the evolution of capuchino seedeaters, and has documented the complex demographic history that has led to this incredible radiation of birds, including an extremely large ancestral effective population size at the…
Nick Mason’s talk at AOU/COS: Grad student Nick Mason talked today about his comparative work on avian vocalizations, in a talk titled Evolutionary rate heterogeneity among learned and innate vocalizations across two prominent clades of Neotropical passerines (Thraupidae, Furnariidae). Those are tanagers and woodcreepers to those of you who might…
Nick Mason is everywhere at AOU/COS…: Grad student Nick Mason is engaged in a busy AOU/COS conference. Yesterday he led a workshop for 25 people on using R (the field’s main statistics+ programming resource) in Ornithology, today he is giving a research talk, tomorrow he is MCing the famous evening…
Congrats to Becca Brunner: UC Berkeley Hellman Fellow. Congratulations to Becca as she heads off to start her PhD at Berkeley, where she has now been named a Hellman Graduate Fellow (and with baobab trees in the background, she definitely wins ‘coolest photo’ in their Hellman Fellow press release)
Jake on manakin phylogeography at Neotropical Ornithology Congress: grad student Jake Berv talked yesterday at the NOC in Manaus (Brazil) about his studies of genetic and song variation in the White-crowned Manakin complex.
Lots and lots and lots of nuthatches: Graduate student Esther Niemasik (from Janis Dickinson’s lab) just completed a month-long genotyping marathon in which she generated parentage data for more than 1400 brown-headed nuthatches from her field site in North Carolina. Analyses are forthcoming, but Esther will know soon whether these…
Postdoc Leo Campagna’s new paper on dissecting the complex demographic and phylogenetic history of the Sporophila seedeaters is just out in Molecular Ecology. In addition to revealing new insights into this avian rapid radiation, Leo and his collaborators also make some useful but sobering points about the potential for spurious…
Luciano Calderón at Argentina Evolution conference: visiting Lab researcher Luciano Calderón is talking today at the first-ever Argentine Evolution meeting (I Reunion Argentina de Biología Evolutiva, in Cordoba, Argentina) about the population genomics of turtle doves across Europe. Luciano visited Cornell in February and worked with postdoc Leo Campagna to…
Scott’s cover article in TREE on climate change and hybrid zones: Postdoc Scott Taylor’s synthetic review of how hybrid zones can be powerful tools for tracking climate change is featured on the cover of the current issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution! Taylor SA, Larson EL, Harrison RG. 2015.…
David’s talk at Evolution: genomics of hybridizing warblers. Postdoc David Toews’ talk at the Evolution conference in Brazil covered his ongoing work on the hybridization genomics of the Myrtle and Audubon’s forms of Yellow-rumped Warblers, and on admixture mapping that is revealing interesting candidate genes for traits that differ between…
Jake’s talk at Evolution: phylogenomics of all birds. Jake Berv’s talk at the evolution meeting was on “A Fully Resolved, Comprehensive Phylogeny of Birds (Aves) using Targeted Next Generation DNA Sequencing.” In it, Jake covered his forthcoming paper on relationships within Neoaves, and on the datasets and analysis methods that…
Leo’s talk at Evolution: genomics of an avian radiation: Leo presented his most recent explorations into genome-wide patterns of divergence in Sporophila seed-eaters using analytical methods pioneered by our collaborators Ilan Gronau and Adam Siepel. This avian radiation is a wonderful test-case of (very) low genetic divergence among a suite…