This semester a
group of EEB undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and faculty will read and discuss chapters from a new edited volume on Phylogenetic Comparative Methods. The book is available online through the University of Rochester River Campus libraries here.
The group will meet weekly on Tuesdays at 4pm in the graduate student lounge starting next week (24 Feb). If you are interested in attending, click more below to see the reading schedule.
We’re going to be discussing some classic papers on species concepts and species delimitation in Journal Club this week. Later in the week, at a day and time that have yet to be determined, members of the Glor Lab will be meeting to discuss two very recent papers from Systematic Biology that use a variety of methods to delimit species in nature based on both morphological and molecular data. The papers are Zapata and Jimenez’s paper on inferring morphological gaps across a geographic landscape and Harrington and Near’s paper on species delimitation in Snubnose darters. Check out the papers and drop me a line if you’d like to join our discussion so I can let you know when we’ll be meeting (we’re trying to figure out everyone’s course schedules before scheduling this time).
Malawi cichlid image from cichlid.umd.edu.
Join the Glor Lab this Friday at 1PM for a bike expedition to the new Aladdin’s at Corn Hill Landing and a discussion of Parnell and Streelman’s new paper on cichlid macroecology [doi link]. We’ll meet out in front of Hutch.
Next Tuesday (7/12) we will discuss chapter 2 (Male and Female Heterogamety: 2-Factor Systems) and chapter 3 (Multiple-Factor Systems) of Jim Bull’s book, Evolution of Sex Determining Mechanisms. We will meet in Hutch. 316 at 12:30pm. All are welcome!
We wrapped up our read of Gillespie (highlights to come in a future post) today and decided to roll right into the next book. Starting next Tuesday (at 12:30 in Hutch 316) we’ll read Jim Bull’s 1993 book, Evolution of Sex Determining Mechanisms.
This one is a little hard to get your hands on, let me know if you can’t track a copy down. We’ll start off with the Introductory chapter (pages 3-10) and decide on an plan for divvying up the rest of the book on Tuesday. As usual, all are welcome.
We will cover chapter 6, Gillespie’s treatment of the neutral theory on Tuesday, 6/21 at 12:30 in Hutch 316. All are welcome to attend.
We will attempt to cover all of chapter 5 on Tuesday, 6/14 at 12:30 in Hutchison 316. At first glance, the math seems a bit simpler than chapter 4.
Our meal at the Peppa Pot and a snapping turtle found along the bike trail.
This Thursday at 1:30PM we’ll be taking another bike expedition to a local eatery. We’ll be discussing two classic papers on community assembly.
Diamond, J. M. and M. E. Gilpin (1982) Examination of the “null” model of Connor and Simberloff for species co-occurrences on islands. Oecologia 52:64-74 [doi link]
Connor, E. F. and D. Simberloff (1979) The assembly of species communities: chance or competition? Ecology 60:1132-1140 [jstor stable URL]
PS – Last week’s outing to the Peppa Pot ended with delicious meals for all! For around $7 you can get a huge plate of Jamaican food including: meat (chicken or oxtail, rice and beans, plantain, duppling, and stewed cabbage.
We will read the math-light sections of Chapter 4 for next Tuesday (6/7). The pages are 142-146 (intro and overview) and 228-230 (an historical note). Yasir will explain the math in between. All are welcome.
We will finish our discussion of chapter 3 (from page 121 to the end) on Tuesday, 5/31. All are welcome. Anthony will lead the discussion.