Jen Walsh on the many ways birds can adapt to live in salt marshes

A new paper in Evolution Letters by lab postdoc Jennifer Walsh studies multiple independent cases of adaptation to salt marsh environments, evaluating weather adaptations are species-specific or convergent. The study focuses on four species of North American sparrows that represent four independent, post‐Pleistocene colonization events by an ancestral, upland subspecies and…

Continue reading

Welcome Callum McDiarmid!

Callum is a PhD student from Macquarie University in Australia and will be visiting the Fuller Lab for six months on a Fulbright scholarship. His PhD research investigates speciation using the long-tailed finch Poephila acuticauda, encompassing the naturally occurring hybrid zone in the Kimberley region, detailed behavioural and physiological experiments in…

Continue reading

Daniel on structural variants in a finch hybrid zone

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…

Continue reading

Stepfanie on flicker hybrids and their coloration genes

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…

Continue reading