Irby just returned from a very fun week-long tour of the Galapagos for Lab of Ornithology members that was run by our long-term colleague Fausto Rodriguez of Galapagos Best. Among the special sightings was an aggressive face-off between a large male tortoise and a large male land iguana (testosterone +…
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…
Wonderful to see so many colleagues old and new! It was fantastic to see so many alumni — former Cornell students, past lab group members, former visiting scientists, field course students, academic advisees … all of you! — at the North American Ornithological Conference this past week! You can read…
Shawn Billerman on sapsuckers at NAOC: Just a few weeks before his dissertation defense at the University of Wyoming, Shawn gave an exciting update on his PhD study of sapsucker hybridization, which he has studied in the field, with genomics, and via niche modelling. Shawn did this work with his…
Scott Taylor on chickadee hybridization and fitness: Dr. Scott Taylor, a former postdoc in our lab (since he is now four days into his new job as a professor at U Colorado!) gave a detailed symposium talk here at the NAOC on the breakdown of metabolic pathways (and the underlying…
Congratulations to Ton Schat, husband of our long-term lab manager emerita Laura Stenzler, for being awarded the 2015 Ezra Technology Innovator Award for his development of a vaccine now given to billions (!!!) of chickens every year: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/10/poultry-vaccine-nets-ezra-technology-innovator-award
Two members of our group–Postdoc Leo Campagna and PhD student Nick Mason–just returned from leading a special multi-day genomics course at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Their course, taught in Spanish to a large and enthusiastic cadre of students and researchers, was an “Introducción a los…
Postdoc David Toews is in the field capturing Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers (like these two which he captured in the very same mist-net). These species hybridize extensively; our goal in this study is to gain a much better understanding of how this ongoing hybridization is manifested in the genome-wide levels…
Congratulations to Nick Mason for winning an American Society of Naturalists Student Research Fellowship!
Andy J. Boyce, Benjamin G. Freeman, Adam E. Mitchell, and Thomas E. Martin (2015) Clutch size declines with elevation in tropical birds. The Auk: April 2015, Vol. 132, No. 2, pp. 424-432. Clutch size commonly decreases with increasing elevation among temperate-zone and subtropical songbird species. Tropical songbirds typically lay small…
Special thanks to postdocs Leo Campagna (based in our lab), Ana Dalziel and Nancy Chen (part of our lab group), and Brett Pasch and Ali Johnston (from other Lab of Ornithology programs) for doing a spectacular job of showcasing our postdoctoral program at the Lab board meeting on Friday, and…
Taylor, S. A., Curry, R. L., White, T. A., Ferretti, V. and Lovette, I. (2014), Spatiotemporally consistent genomic signatures of reproductive isolation in a moving hybrid zone. Evolution, 68: 3066–3081. Abstract: Studies of hybrid zone dynamics often investigate a single sampling period and draw conclusions from that temporal snapshot. Stochasticity can,…