Research events - Page 17

The journal club is back from summer vacations and we`ll dive into species diversification with the latest paper from Lewitus & Morlon (2016): "Natural constraints to species diversification". Join us!

The recent emergence of plague, Yersinia pestis, as a flea-borne pathogen in the last 3,000-6,000 years provides a compelling example of how evolutionary changes can lead to a new bacterial pathogen. We will discuss the recent review, "Ecological opportunity, Evolution, and the Emergence of Flea-borne Plague," by Hinnebusch et. al., about Y. pestis and the closely related enteric pathogen, Y. psuedotuberculosis.

Historical records can provide useful insights into the epidemiology and transmission dynamics of infectious diseases of the past. We will discuss the recently published paper, "Epidemiological analysis of the Eyam plague outbreak of 1665-1666," by L.K. Whittles and X. Didelot, where they used parish records to study the transmission mode and seasonality of plague during a well-known epidemic.

This week we read a paleobioogical paper by Kiessling and Kocsis on  Biodiversity dynamics and environmental occupancy of fossil azooxanthellate and zooxanthellate scleractinian corals. Paleobiology, 41, pp 402-414

This Friday the 17th of June we will discuss a recent paper by Green & Sharpe (2015): "Positional information and reaction-diffusion: two big ideas in developmental biology combine".

Hope to see you there!

By Stephanie M. Carlson

This Friday the 10th of June we will discuss a recent paper by Lawing et al. (2016): "Community functional trait composition at the continental scale: the effects of non-ecological processes."

Hope to see you there!

By David Houle from Florida State University

This Friday the 3rd of June we will discuss a recent paper by Arif et al (2013): "Genetic and developmental analysis of differences in eye and face morphology between Drosophila simulans and Drosophila mauritiana".

Hope to see you there!

Trait-based demographic models such as IPMs relate not only future adult size but also offspring size to the current size of an individual. This is in stark contrast to the quantitative genetic approach, and may have consequences for the predictions of evolutionary dynamics.

We look into this issue with a recent paper from Chevin:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.12389/full

This Friday the 13th of May we will discuss a recent paper by Chevin (2016): "Species selection and random drift in macroevolution".

Hope to see you there!

Late Lunch Talk by Hanna Nyborg Støstad, Natural History Museum (UiO)

In a recent session, discussion rose about reproductive value and fitness. In fact, there is much controversy concerning definitions, and while the definition of reproductive value is relatively straightforward, its  interpretation, in particular as a fitness measure, is more confusing.

For this session, we want to look a bit more into that topic, starting off with Jacob Moorad's recent paper:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/13-0778.1/full

This Friday the 29nd of April we will discuss a recent paper by our former CEES colleague Mark Grabowski : "Bigger brains led to bigger bodies?: The correlated evolution of human brain and body size". You can read some of the press cover about the article here.

Come discuss the evolution of our genus!

This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled "Ancient horizontal transfers of retrotransposons between birds and ancestors of human pathogenic nematodes"

by Suh et al. 2016 (Nature Communications)

Late Lunch Talk by Cecilia Helmerson, CEES

By Fabienne Krauer from Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM), University of Bern, Switzerland

This Friday the 22nd of April we will discuss a paper by Kaji et al. (2016): "Functional transformation series and the evolutionary origin of novel forms: evidence from a remarkable termite defensive organ".

Hope to see you there!

Population models such as IPM's allow the inclusion of continuous traits for demographic analysis, and therefore the tracking of phenotypic change over time. Especially in the case of rapid phenotypic change, it was therefore only a matter of time until methods were developed to identify the sources of such change as evolution, plasticity or demography. One such method is the age-structured Price equation, developed by Coulson & Tuljapurkar in the paper we are discussing this session:

"The Dynamics of a Quantitative Trait in an Age-structured Population Living in a Variable Environment" (Coulson & Tuljapurkar 2008)

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/591693

This thursday, at the Speciation Journal Club, we will discuss a paper entitled 

"Determining epistatic selection in admixed populations" by Schumer and Brandvain 2016 (Molecular Ecology)

Late Lunch Talk by José Cerca de Oliveira from the Natural History Museum of Oslo

By Martijn van de Pol & Callum Lawson

This Friday the 15th of April we will discuss a paper by Benson et al. (2016): "Near-Stasis in the Long-Term Diversification of Mesozoic Tetrapods".

Hope to see you there!