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…
We are all very excited that Shawn Billerman has just arrived back at the Lab in his new role as an NSF postdoctoral fellow! Shawn will be working on the genomics of birds that hybridize in the Great Plains region, taking advantage of the extensive collections from that region that…
Visiting scientist Luciano Caldarón, our own Leo Campagna, and a cadre of collaborators just published a paper showing that the European Turtle Dove shows genetic evidence of a fluctuating demography over time, and is currently undergoing a shrinking phase. The combined effect of demography, habitat destruction and hunting is causing…
Postdoc Dave Toews recently presented on warbler genomics at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center as an invited speaker. Dave got to tour their well appointed genomics facility and met with the researchers and post docs interested in avian genomics and conservation.
Congratulations to Andy Johnson for persevering through the publication processs to see his undergrad thesis work out in a peer-reviewed journal. Andy spent two arduous summers in the high arctic putting migration tracking devices on Whimbrels–a first summer to deploy them, a second summer to get them back, and a…
Lab of Ornithology postdoc (and first author) Rusty Ligon and grad student Nick Mason are part of a team that just published a neat paper on the evolution of plumage coloration among finches: Ligon, R. A., Simpson, R. K., Mason, N. A., Hill, G. E., & McGraw, K. J. (2016).…
Postdoc Jen Walsh just returned from a very successful trip to southern California, where she was sampling birds like this salt-marsh-dwelling Savannah Sparrow as part of her broader project on avian adaptations to extreme and challenging environments.
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…
This week Jake Berv presented his work on the avian mass extinction at the K/Pg boundary to the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. Jake’s recent work has focused on how genomes evolve in response to mass extinctions that select for life history traits. This was our lab’s first-ever…
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…
We are enjoying a hard-working visit by Argentinians Dr. Cecilia Kopuchian and Dr. Darío Lijtmaer, who along with Leo Campagna from our lab are in the midst of prepping LOTS of samples for ddRAD sequencing as part of a project investigating the potential role of rivers as barriers to gene…
Grad student Natalie Hofmeister and former lab member Dustin Rubenstein just published a new paper in Ecology Letters on adaptation to environmental variability in African starlings. Natalie and Dustin show that variability in the environment of African starlings influences patterns of substitution in the glucocorticoid receptor, which allows organisms to…
Congratulations to our Ben Van Doren for being awarded the WOS prize for best undergraduate research presentation at the North American Ornithological Conference this past week! And likewise congratulations to grad student Sahas Barve for winning one of the main grad student presentation awards, Teresa Pegan for placing highly in…
Jake brings home the NAOC talks: Grad student Jake Berv was the closer in our long series of presentations at the NAOC meeting that ended yesterday. Talking in the very last session of the conference, Jake presented on his deep-time comparisons of diversification patterns in the avian Tree-of-Life, and on…
Petra Deane-Coe on Swamp Sparrow adaptation: PhD student Petra Deane-Coe gave a clear and animated talk on her innovative explorations of adaptive divergence in swamp sparrows that reside in different marsh habitats. Part of Petra’s presentation involved an in-depth comparison of differentiation as measured through complementary metrics for comparing genome-wide…