OK, final INTECOL broadcast: in case someone is interested, I have uploaded the talk I gave in London at slideshare. As said before, a preprint of the study is available on the arXiv. INTECOL13 Talk: Hartig et al.: Dynamic versus evolutionary stability – divergent insights from coexistence theory and evolutionary ecology from florianhartig
OK, I’m off to INTECOL, hope to see you there! I haven’t uploaded my slides, but I have put the preprint of the study I’ll be presenting on the arXiv. Hartig, F.; Münkemüller, T.; Johst, K. & Dieckmann, U. (under review) On the sympatric evolution of coexistence by relative nonlinearity of competition arXiv:1308.3114. If this…
Another step sorting out the evolutionary history of humans and other great apes, reported in Nature. For the study, 79 wild- and captive-born individuals representing all six great ape species and seven subspecies were sequenced. The results don’t seem particularly surprising We find extensive inbreeding in almost all wild populations, with eastern gorillas being the…
is probably *TATA* – the lungfish. OK, I spoiled the surprise, but if you have any interest in evolution, you should still read this excellent paper on the evolution of the first tetrapods in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. It’s just amazing what the molecular biology colleagues are pulling out of full genome sequencing data in…
The new issue of Science will appear tomorrow, but I still wanted to spend some more words on the current issue, which has clearly been a treat for the ecologically minded reader – not only did it solve the mystery of fairy circles, but there are also two papers on pollination (services) and a quite…
Tomorrow’s edition of Nature has a paper that may be interesting for some from a biological / genetic viewpoint. The story they spin around that, however, should serve as advice to all of us how to sell a fairly theoretical study to a top-ranked journal. The authors state their motivation as follows: As anthropogenic activities…
In a new paper that will appear in Nature tomorrow, Walter Jetz and Colleagues “present, analyse and map the first complete dated phylogeny of all 9,993 extant species of birds, a widely studied group showing many unique adaptations.” The emphasis here is on the word “dated” – the study provides estimated diversification rates across the…
The Friday Coffee Break points to a newly forming evolutionary biology online journal club. I think that this is an awesome idea, not only for being able to have some discussion about your research field when you’re relatively isolated in your department, but also to get to know people from different institutions across the world.…
We all knew it, but now it’s official: Tim W. Fawcett and Andrew D. Higginson show in a new PNAS article titled “Heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists” that The density of equations in an article [addition: in the field of ecology and evolution] has a significant negative impact on citation rates, with…
I was blogging recently about a study on the evolution of the Gorilla and its ancestral relationship to the other great apes. Now, the circle on the sequencing of the great apes closes with a new study published today in Nature, which presents a genome-wide sequence of the Bonobo, contrasted with the chimpanzee and the…
There’s an interesting new study in tomorrow’s issue of nature. Andrew F. Hugall and Devi Stuart-Fox use molecular phylogenies to look at speciation rates of birds. I cite from the abstract: … we confirm, using species-level molecular phylogenies for five families of non-passerine birds, that colour polymorphism is associated with accelerated speciation rates in the…
A article in tomorrow’s edition of Nature caught my eye – Iñigo Martincorena and colleagues have sequenced a number of Escherichia coli genomes and compare the speed of genetic drift at different locations in the genome. They observe that the neutral mutation rate varies by more than an order of magnitude across 2,659 genes, with…
Evolution is a tricky thing – and so is inferring general theory from simplified model results. This is proven once again in a new study by Leithen K. M’Gonigle with Ulf Dieckmann as senior author, which challenges the wide held belief that sexual selection alone cannot stabilize coexistence in the absence of ecological differentiation when…
A colleague pointed me towards an interesting new article by Jerry A. Coyne in Evolution. In, so much should be noted as a disclaimer, an openly partisan note by an evolutionary biologist who has a history of fighting creationism and intelligent design, Coyne explores the degree of believe in evolution and science, particularly in the…
Polar bears, by Alan D. Wilson (naturespicsonline.com: [1]) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Here’s something for the lovers of cute fluffy white mammals: a new study in science lead by Frank Hailer uses nuclear markers to infer the time at which polar bears split up from their ancestral brown bear lineage. Previous analysis, based on…
It seems the time is there for coupling genetics, ecology and evolution, at least Nature is pulling out one interesting paper after the other in that area (see also the recent posts 1,2). One of the latest outcomes is an impressive study by a large group of authors around Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin, who…
In a proverbial “mammoth project”, Lorenzen and colleagues report in this weeks issue of Nature on the responses of six Late Quaternary megafauna herbivores (woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, horse, reindeer/caribou, bison and musk ox) to climate and humans. The authors draw on various data sources, in particular species distribution models and ancient DNA, to “reconstruct…
I want to highlight two interesting papers coming out last week in the field of phylogenetics and evolution. The first is a paper by Nagalingum et al. who use fossil-calibrated molecular phylogenies to examine the diversification of cycads, and ancient lineage of woody plants. The cycad record dates back at least to the early Permian…
theoretical ecology 