A year-long look at the fish (and other animals) in a single seagrass bed

Today my lab's first data-driven paper has been published online! It's called Seasonal Dynamics of Faunal Diversity and Population Ecology in an Estuarine Seagrass Bed and is published in the journal Estuaries and Coasts. The research was led by my first masters student, Micaela Pullen, who graduated with her MSc last year in 2021. In …

Monitoring vertebrates in Antarctica using eDNA: a review

My amazing student Lucy Howell has written an excellent review highlighting the untapped potential of environmental DNA to monitor vertebrates (i.e., animals with backbones) in Antarctica, and the paper was recently published in a special issue of the New Zealand Journal of Zoology.

A review of parentage analysis

A review of parentage analysis -- a summary of my recent paper in Molecular Ecology

How can modern genetic tools be used in conservation assessment and monitoring?

Conservation scientists want to be able to measure how much variation threatened populations have and monitor changes in variation over time, especially if they have done some sort of intervention to increase diversity in a population. NIMBioS hosted a workshop to try to advance our ability to use genetic tools to monitor this variation, and my research publications in Evolutionary Applications are a result.

RAD-seq in pipefish: a cautionary tale

At one point during my PhD my advisor joked that my dissertation could at least be titled, "RAD-seq in pipefish: a cautionary tale". Luckily, that didn't end up being the case, but my recently-published paper Substantial differences in bias between single-digest and double-digest RAD-seq: a case study comes pretty close.

Finding limitations with common analysis methods: my new paper

A common goal in evolutionary biology is to understand how selection acts on traits and how genetic variants associated with those traits are affected by selection. The effect of selection on the genome is particularly interesting because there are situations where we know that populations are likely under different selection pressures (for example, one population …

Why I Marched

On Saturday, April 22, 2017, an unprecedented number of scientists and science enthusiasts turned out around the country to rally and march for science. I showed up to march for many reasons.

Pipefish pairing

In my recent paper published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, I described the results of some of the work I did while in Sweden (which I've written about previously 1,2,3). I discovered that individual quality (both male quality and female quality) and timing of reproduction impact reproductive success in the broad-nosed pipefish, Syngnathus typhle. This …

Understanding the different components of selection

Selection can have trade-offs at many different points during an individual's lifetime, not just between natural and sexual selection. Males and females are often under different selection pressures, and natural selection can also be broken down into different episodes or components. In my most recent paper, I used the selection components analysis approach in a population of pipefish to identify SNPs associated with differential viability in the sexes and to find SNPs associated with sexual selection.

Population genomics: what is it and why should you care?

Population genomics studies shifts in the frequency of alleles (the different varieties of the same gene) throughout the genome. Population genomics impacts many fields of biology, including molecular ecology, evolutionary genetics, conservation genetics, and medical genetics.