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 …

Working in the age of lockdowns: looking back on 2020 and 2021

Each year I look back at how I spent my time at work (because I track my time, and should do something with the data!). In the past, I have written about how I've spent my time (reflecting on the transition from postdoc to academic in 2018 and after a full year at my job …

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.

2019 Year in Review

In 2019 I traveled around New Zealand, began 4 new collaborations, received a major grant, and tracked my time!

A review of parentage analysis

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

Looking back at 2018 and the transition from postdoc to faculty

Looking back at 2018 - the transition to a faculty job and reflecting on #365papers

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 …

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 …