Were Australia’s lyrebirds the first ‘meme generators’? By Pat Leonard September 17, 2018 Australia’s Superb Lyrebird – the most astonishing animal mimic in the world – has been communicating with memes through song and dance for millions of years. “These days we usually think of memes as bits of culture…
Just-arrived postdoc Daniel Hooper has a paper from his dissertation newly out in Nature Ecology and Evolution entitled Chromosomal inversion differences correlate with range overlap in passerine birds. Abstract is copied below, but his ‘behind the paper’ article in the same issue is also very much worth a read. Abstract:…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon’s paper is featured on the cover of the current issue of PLOS Genetics. Here is what that journal has to say about her contribution: Florida Scrub-Jays reveal new details about isolation-by-distance. The pattern of isolation-by-distance is observed often in nature, but we rarely have means to…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon sent along this link to where her poster is featured on a site about scientific poster design and communication. I’m flagging it here both because the expert at the site found only a few things to tweak on Stepfanie’s work, and because the site itself is…
A paper resulting from Benjamin Van Dooren’s undergraduate honors thesis is out in the latest issue of Molecular Ecology where is is accompanied by a great commentary by Reto Buri. Ben did this honors project in our lab and went on to receive a Marshall Scholarship for his PhD at…
PhD student Stepfanie Aguillon is this month’s featured scientist on our graduate student association home page — http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/grads/ — which is worth checking out both to read about Stepfanie and because the site as a whole is indicative of the strength of our graduate program in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.
Leo Campagna gave a talk today on the genomic architecture of phenotypic differences in capuchino seedeaters. The study (recently published in Science Advances) shows that there are very small genetic differences among these species and that they tend to center around regions that are likely to control the expression of…
Catalina Palacios, a PhD student from Daniel Cadena’s lab group in Colombia, is finishing her six-month research visit by talking about the genomic results from her study of two hummingbird species. Catalina’s work shows how whole genome sequencing can help distinguish hummingbird species that resisted delimitation with other techniques (mtdna…
Lab associate John Sullivan and undergraduate Madi Rich, along with colleagues, published a paper this month in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society that describes a ‘lost’ species of electric fish from the Ogooué River of Gabon. A nice write-up on this project is on the Cornell Chronicle site…
This blog has a great write-up on Liz, who created many wonderful illustrations for our lab’s scientific papers when she was here last year as a Bartel’s artist, and who is now back for a repeat performance as the instructor for the art class that forms a core part of…
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…
I’m tardy to post here that postdoc Dave Toews recently published an ornithologically quite noteworthy paper in the Auk: Ornithological Advances from his PhD work at the University of British Columbia with Darren Irwin. Their study found evidence of strongly heterogeneous genomic divergence between a number of groups in the…
Here’s a shot of David and Canadian Minister of Science Dr. Kirsty Duncan at a reception in Ottawa this week in honor of the current cohort of Banting Postdoctoral Scholars:
Nick on AOS professional society trends and challenges: Graduate student Nick Mason is the lead author on a paper out today that reports on a wide spectrum of trends and challenges related to membership in the American Ornithological Society. This survey was a major undertaking, the analyses are robust, and…
Winged warblers: the story is out! David Toews’ presentation on the work he and Scott Taylor have led on the genomics of Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers played to a standing-room-only audience at the North American Ornithological Conference yesterday, and apparently there were many dozens of additional people left outside who…
Sapayoas are cool: a group of Cornell students including current senior Ben Van Doren and junior Sarah Djelski are getting some nice attention for their paper on the biology of the enigmatic Sapayoa, a little-known bird of Panama and northern South America that turns out to be the only representative…
Cornell article on our Patagonia field course: http://spring2016.periodicals.cals.cornell.edu/students/new-ecology-course-takes-students-patagonia
Congratulations to course organizers/leaders Ben Freeman and Alexa Class Freeman, and to the student co-authors, for the first of several scientific papers arising out of their Spring 2015 Advanced Tropical Ornithology course. Back at the curriculum review stage there was some healthy push-back when peer-reviewed student publications were suggested as…
Postdocs Scott Taylor and Leo Campagna have a substantial commentary appearing in this week’s issue of Science (!) on avian supergenes, as exemplified by recent studies of ruffs and white-throated sparrows. Read it here: TaylorCampagnaScienceAvianSupergenes
Required reading on avian genomics… Marshaling a diverse group of co-authors, post-docs Dave Toews, Scott Taylor and Leonardo Campagna spearheaded the publication of a new synthetic review in the Auk: Ornithological Advances on genomic applications in avian systems. Lab PhD students Nicolas Mason and Petra Deane-Coe are also co-authors on…