Jen Walsh and Shawn Billerman recently had an invited review paper on using historical DNA from museum specimens come out for a special issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, “Using ancient DNA to understand evolution in the Anthropocene.” Their paper, “Historical DNA as a tool to address key questions in avian…
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…
A new paper in Evolution by research associate Leonardo Campagna explores the genomic mechanisms that have led to the evolution of flightlessness in the Patagonian steamer ducks. The different steamer duck species vary in their morphology, representing a continuum between the conditions allowing flight and those resulting in flightlessness. Whereas most…
A new paper in Molecular Ecology by Conor Taff, Leonardo Campagna and Maren Vitousek explores whether patterns of methylation across the whole genome are related to variation in stress resilience in tree swallows. The paper includes the first draft genome for this species and finds differentially methylated areas associated to different predictors of…
Congratulations to PhD candidate Stepfanie Aguillon for being awarded a prestigious year-long fellowship from the American Association of University Women! Stepfanie joins a select group of 23 previous Cornell awardees since 2004, including four past PhD candidates from our Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department.
Postdoc Nati Garcia has a new paper out in Behavioral Ecology entitled What have we recently learned about song learning and social interactions? Abstract: Vocal learning in birds is a complex animal behavior with several parallels to vocal learning in humans. Early experiments in the 70s showing that juvenile birds…
Like many professional organizations, the American Ornithology Society only works because so many people volunteer their time and effort. I am particularly proud of the many ways that members of our Lab group contributed to the conference in Anchorage beyond giving scientific talks and posters: Leo Campagna: Judge for student…
Cecilia Estalles will visit our lab for the summer to work on her dissertation on capuchino seedeaters. Adult capuchino males of different species vary in coloration across various patches and usually many patches change together at the same time. During her stay in Ithaca she will work with Leo Campagna to…
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…
As part of our collaborative, NSF-funded project on cultural and genetic evolution in lyrebirds, lab group undergraduates Chloe Mikles ’20 and Kelsie Lopez ’21, joined by Kevin Macias ’21 and Eric Hughes ’21, are currently in the Blue Mountains of Australia studying the Superb Lyrebird. The group is working with Vicky…
PhD student Natalie Hoffmeister helped close out the AOS conference in Anchorage with her talk on patterns of genomic variation in starlings. Natalie’s work contrasts the North American starling invasion, in which there are low levels of geographic structuring, with the Australian invasion that is likely associated with higher levels…
Postdoc Sabrina McNew presented a talk at the AOS conference in Anchorage on the drivers of community structure in both birds and their blood parasites. Sabrina’s study looked at patterns across high-diversity sites in Peru, finding that patterns of bird community structure are most heavily influenced by environmental predictors, whereas…
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…
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…
Tulane PhD student Sarah Khalil presented a strong talk at the AOS conference on genomic work that she has done as a visiting scholar in our lab at Cornell. Sarah’s presentation focused on her explorations of the genes that underlie the orange – red variation in male coloration in red-backed…
Research Associate Shawn Billerman gave a talk on hybrid zones in the AOS conference symposium co-organized by other members of our lab group. Shawn’s presentation treated his studies of genetic exchange across coincident hybrid zones in the Great Plains region, in this iteration the differences between the high levels of…
Grad student Stepfanie Aguillon and postdocs Jen Walsh and Gemma Clucas co-organized a great AOS conference symposium on Lessons from Avian Hybrid Zones and the Maintenance of Species Boundaries. The symposium was filled with cutting-edge research presented by people from many institutions, representing a great variety of study systems and…
PhD student Amelia Demery presented a talk at the AOS conference in Anchorage on the genomics of biological invasion, in which she explored differences among house finch populations within and beyond the Hawaiian Islands. Amelia’s work highlights how invading taxa have variable demographic histories, and how they can become genomically…
Dave Toews gave a great talk to a large AOS conference audience as the 2019 winner of the Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award. Dave recently moved to his new position as an Assistant Professor at Penn State, but much of his talk centered on studies that he did during…
Research Associate Leo Campagna presented a talk at the AOS conference in Anchorage on how some populations of steamer-ducks have lost the ability to fly, whereas others remain capable of long-distance flight. Leo’s study combines a phylogenetic investigation of the history of differentiation and gene exchange among these populations with…