Congratulations to former EXEB-member Kristina Karlsson-Green and her new large grant

 Posted by Erik Svensson

There are moment's in a senior researcher's career which are especially nice. It can be when one get's a paper accepted. Or when some of your PhD-student's defend their thesis. Or when the student obtain a postdoctoral research grant. Or when the student obtains his or her first large grant or establishes him- or herself as an independent scientist. Perhaps this latter thing is the moment that is especially nice for former advisors.

And this is exactly what has happened to Kristina Karlsson-Green, among us mostly known as "Tina", who just received a prestiguous and very competitive "International Career Grant" from the Swedish Research Council (VR). This grant amounts to 1.8 million SEK/year for a period for four years, and enables Tina to establish her own research programme at the Agricultural University in Alnarp, where she is currently located, after her first postdoc in Finland in the laboratory of Anna-Liisa Laine.

I feel extremely priviligied to have had so great PhD-students, who have seldom made me disappointed, and who have clearly shown their independence by establishing themselves in the extremely competitive science world. Today I am very proud and happy that Tina can continue her research career - to the benefit of both herself, her current colleagues and to the joy and happiness of myself and all her former research colleagues in EXEB.

Well done Tina! You rock!

On elytral morphology, sexual conflict and female mating polymorphism in diving beetles: new paper in "Interface"

Posted by Erik Svensson

Forrmer PhD-student Kristina Karlsson-Green (currently postdoc in the "Metapopulation Research Group in Helsinkki, Finland) has published one of her last thesis-paper in the Royal Society Journal "Interface". This paper deals with a fascinating female mating polymorphism in diving beetles, where females have either a "rough" or "smooth" elytral morphology. She has quantified fine-scale female elytral morphology using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), as well as male morphological adaptations to clasp females during matings in the form of so-called "suction cups" (see picture above), and also used a biomechanical experiments to quantify male adhesion ability on the different female morphologies.

Results provide experimental support to the suggestion that this female mating polymorphism is maintained by sexually antagonistic and frequency-dependent selection caused by sexual conflict, and different male phenotypes show different ability to clasp the different female morphs. The experiments in this fascinating study were performed in collaboration with our colleague Prof. Stanislav N. Gorb, at Kiel University (Germany), and I personally like this combination of biomechanics and evolutionary biology very much. Below, you find a link and Abstract to the study.

Male clasping ability, female polymorphism and sexual conflict: fine-scale elytral morphology as a sexually antagonistic adaptation in female diving beetles

1. Kristina Karlsson Green, 
2. Alexander Kovalev, 
3. Erik I. Svensson and
4. Stanislav N. Gorb

During sexual conflict, males and females are expected to evolve traits and behaviours with a sexually antagonistic function. Recently, sexually antagonistic coevolution was proposed to occur between male and female diving beetles (Dytiscidae). Male diving beetles possess numerous suction cups on their forelegs whereas females commonly have rough structures on their elytra. These rough structures have been suggested to obstruct adhesion from male suction cups during mating attempts. However, some diving beetle species are dimorphic, where one female morph has a rough elytra and the other has a smooth elytra. Here, we used biomechanics to study the adhesive performance of male suction cups on the female morphs in two diving beetle species: Dytiscus lapponicus and Graphoderus zonatus. We compared adhesion on the rough and the smooth female morphs to infer the function of the rough elytral modifications. We found that the adhesive force on the rough structures was much lower than on other surfaces. These findings support the suggestion of sexual conflict in diving beetles and a sexually antagonistic function of the rough female structures. In addition, males differed in their adhesive capacity on different female surfaces, indicating a male trade-off between adhering to smooth and rough female morphs.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2012!

 Another year has soon passed, and I wish to say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you involved in research in lab. This includes both those of you who are currently in Lund, and those of you who are elsewhere in the world, such as in exotic countries like Norway and Australia.

The pictures above come from the Christmas Meeting in the new Evolutionary Ecology Unit, which was held last week. After talks in the afternoon by several group members and other colleagues in the new unit, it was time for the traditional Swedish Christmas Table, or "Julbord" As you see, Jessica Abbott participated too, after several years of exile in Canada and Uppsala. Jessica will start her new position in Lund in January 2012, after receiving her "Junior Project Grant" from Vetenskapsrådet in 2011. Tina Karlsson also participated, and she will leave to start her postdoc in Finland (Helsinkki) in May 2012.

The year 2011 was an extremely successful year for our lab, in terms of succesful grant applications. Apart from Jessica obtaining a VR-grant and Tina getting a postdoc-grant from VR, Fabrice Eroukhmanoff obtained an EU/Marie Curie postdoc in December, and Machteld Verzijden got extension on her postdoc from the Wennergren Foundation. Considering the severe competition for grants these days, I am both amazed and proud of these achievements of you guys. And you should be as well, of course.

The year 2011 was also  successful in terms of publishing, with nice papers in leading journals, such as Animal Behaviour, BMC Evolutionary Biology, Heredity, Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, to name a few. We are clearly doing work that is interesting and relevant, and I have the feeling we are moving in the right direction to be even more succesful in the coming years.

Once again: Merry Christmas and enjoy the break! See you in 2012!

Congratulations to Tina for obtaining postdoctoral grant from The Swedish Research Council

Former PhD-student from our lab Kristina Karlsson-Green have just found out that she has been awarded a postdoctoral grant from "The Swedish Research Council" (VR), so that she can go to University of Helsinkki (Finland) for two  years and work with Junior Project Leader Dr. Anna-Liisa Laine, who is part of the famous "Metapopulation Ecology Research"-group lead by Professor Ilkka Hanski, who visited Lund and Sweden earlier this year when his research as a recipient of prestiguous "Crafoord Prize".

In Finland, Tina will work on a project with butterflies on the interface between sexual selection, parasites, host-pathogen interactions and trophic interactions. The study species will be the famous butterfly The Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia,; see picture above), who among its host plants also have Plantago lanceolata, which is infected by a fungal pathogen, which in turn has cascading effects at higher trophic interactions, such as those between the butterflies and parasitoids. This seems like an extremely exciting cutting-edge scientific project with links to community ecology, behavioural ecology and coevolutionary processes, and it will be very interesting to hear about the results from the planned studies.

Tina's success in obtaining one of these highly competitive postdoctoral research grant is mainly her own accomplishment, and shows her quality as an independent young scientist. Still, as former advisor, I feel very proud of her, as well as for my first PhD-student Jessica Abbott, who was able to obtain a "Junior Project Grant" earlier this month from VR.

Students and postdocs from this research lab are doing remarkably well in the stiff competition for grants and scholarships. Why this is so is up to others to analyze, and it is probably some kind of interaction effect between personalities in our group, as well as with other colleagues in our department. Whatever the reason(-s), I am very confident that these grants are not the last and that this positive trend  in grant success will continue in the future. The best thing we can do, and a good investment for the future, is to keep up with our regular lab-meetings and interesting scientific discussions about papers and science, encourage and stimulate each other, communicate our findings and joy on this blog and maintain a good spirit and positive attitude towards our work. In the end, I am convinced that these things are far more important than large grants.  Well done Tina!

ESEB-meeting in Tuebingen (Germany) 20-25 August 2011

The European Evolutionary Biology meeting ("ESEB") is quickly approaching, and several current and past members of our laboratory will participate, either with posters or with talks. The scientific programme looks really exciting and can be found here.  I will try to publish one or several blog posts with my impressions from the conference, and I would encourage all of you who read this and have permission to publish on the blog to also do so, to share our experiences and impressions with others.

I will give a talk myself as invited speaker in the session "Speciation by natural versus sexual selection" on Wednesday August 24. PhD-student Anna Runemark from our lab was also offered the opportunity to give a talk about her work on inbreeding and purging of the genetic load in island populations of lizards, and it will take place the same day as mine.

Also, our incoming postdoc from Japan, Dr. Yuma Takahashi, will give a talk about frequency-dependent evolutionary dynamics of genetic polymorphisms in Ischnura senegalensis on Sunday August 21 at 11.00 in the "Life-history"-session. Do not miss it! Apart from these three talks, there will also be poster contributions from former lab-member Jessica Abbott and current postdocs Kristina Karlsson Green, Machteld Verzijden, Maren Wellenreuther and Sophia Engel, as well as several other contributions from the Department of Biology in Lund, of course.

I am very much looking forward to this meeting, and I hope to be able to talk to most of you, perhaps even gather the whole crowd of current, former and incoming lab-members and go for a dinner together. Perhaps Tuesday evening (August 23)? Let's try to get in touch during the meeting, even though it will be difficult in the large crowd of evolutionary biologists.

Active males, reactive females: stereotypic sex roles in sexual conflict research?

In Animal Behaviour you could now find an article by Kristina Karlsson Green and Josefin Madjidian on the possible use anthropomorphic sex-stereotypes in sexual conflict research. Probably all research on animal behaviour is at the risk of using anthropomorphic descriptions and interpretations but perhaps research dealing with males and females is at special risk. This may be so because sex role stereotypes are among the most common stereotypes in Western society, something which may be difficult to get rid of although we as researchers strive for objectivity. Differences in how the sexes’ are characterised and how research tends to focus on certain aspects of the theory for males and other aspects of the theory for females has been discussed within sexual selection research. Although sexual conflict research also has an extensive focus on the sexes, to our knowledge, our study is the first which addresses how the sexes are conceptualised within this research field. Below you could read the abstract and here you can find the article. You can also find a previous discussion on our blog where the outline of this study first was presented.

Active males, reactive females: stereotypic sex roles in sexual conflict research?

Kristina Karlsson Green and Josefin A. Madjidian

Abstract

Sexual selection research has always been a subject for debate. Much of the criticism has concerned the imposition of conventional sex roles based on an anthropomorphic view of animals imposed by the researcher. This conventional view may have hampered research, for example from acknowledging male mate choice. Sexual conflict theory is a fast-growing research field, which initially stems from sexual selection research. We investigated how the sexes are described in sexual conflict research and what characteristics they are assigned. We assessed these topics with literature studies of (1) the terminology used and (2) what parameters are incorporated in sexual conflict models. We found that males and females are consequently described with different words, which have different connotations regarding activity in the conflict. Furthermore, theoretical models mainly investigate conflict costs for females, although costs for both sexes are necessary for coevolutionary dynamics. We argue that sexual conflict research uses stereotypic characterizations of the sexes, where males are active and females reactive. Thus, previous discussions on the use of anthropomorphic terms in sexual selection seem not to have had any impact on sexual conflict research, which is why the topic of stereotyping the sexes is still of current importance. We suggest that scientific gains can be made by eliminating a sex-stereotyped perspective.

Seminar by Nina Wedell on selfish genetic elements and sexual selection and PhD-thesis defency by Kristina Karlsson

This week our department will be visited by Professor Nina Wedell (Exeter University, UK), who will act as an external faculty opponent on the thesis of Kristina Karlsson Green, on Friday November 26 (09.30, "Blue Hall", Ecology Building).


Nina Wedell is well-known for her research on sperm competition, sexual selection and mating system evolution in insects. You can read more about her research here, and here you can find some of her publications. Here is an article about Ninas recent research on the evolutionary consequences and benefits of female promiscuity.


Nina Wedell will arrive to our department already on Thursday (November 25), and will present a research seminar at 14.00 entitled: 


"Selfish genetic elements and sexual selection"


This talk is co-arranged with The Research School in Genomic Ecology (GENECO), and there will also be another talk by Sören Molin the same afternoon and the same place (Lecture Hall, Biology Building, Sölvegatan 35 A), but at 15.15. Note that both these talks do not take place in the "Blue Hall", but in a separate building ("The Biology Building").

Recently we have published two studies based on the isopod system of Asellus aquatics. This species occurs in two ecotypes, which resides in different habitats. As the ecotypes are present in several Swedish lakes, this system has been studied in depth with regard to parallel evolution. Our new articles address differences in mating behavior between the ecotypes. As other crustaceans, A. aquaticus exhibits precopulatory mate guarding where the male captures a female before she is receptive and carries her beneath him until she is ready to mate. This behavior is target for sexual conflict in several isopods as the optimal initiation of pairbonding may differ between the sexes.

One of our articles, published in the latest number of Journal of Evolutionary Biology, deals with differences between the ecotypes in mate guarding duration, but also in differences in female survival and offspring production. Among other things, we found a pattern of parallel evolution in these traits. The other article, published in open access journal PLoS ONE, deals with differences in mating propensity between the ecotypes and how this is affected by demographic factors. Here, we found that the novel ecotype seem to have evolved a plastic behavior as response to sex ratio, in contrast to the ancestral ecotype.

You could find both abstracts below, and both articles are included in Kristina Karlsson Green’s thesis that will be defended on next Friday.

Parallel divergence in mate guarding behaviour following colonization of a novel habitat

K. Karlsson, F. Eroukhmanoff, R. Härdling & E.I. Svensson

Abstract

Ecological factors can have profound effects on mating system and mating behaviour. We investigated the effect of altered ecological conditions, following colonization of a novel habitat, on precopulatory mate guarding in a freshwater isopod (Asellus aquaticus). This isopod occurs in two different ecotypes, which coexist within several different lakes in Sweden but which utilize different habitats. These ecotypes have rapidly (ca. 40 generations) diverged in parallel among lakes in several phenotypic characters, presumably as a response to different predatory pressures. Here, we demonstrate that also mate guarding characteristics have diverged in parallel between the ecotypes in different lakes. This is one of the few studies reporting parallel evolution of mating behaviour. Furthermore, our results also indicate a potential sexual conflict, as the length of mate guarding appears to lower components of female fitness. We discuss how novel environments might have strong and rapid effects on mate guarding dynamics and mating behaviour.

Phenotypic Plasticity in Response to the Social Environment: Effects of Density and Sex Ratio on Mating Behaviour Following Ecotype Divergence

Kristina Karlsson^*, Fabrice Eroukhmanoff, Erik I. Svensson

Abstract

The ability to express phenotypically plastic responses to environmental cues might be adaptive in changing environments. We studied phenotypic plasticity in mating behaviour as a response to population density and adult sex ratio in a freshwater isopod (Asellus aquaticus). A. aquaticus has recently diverged into two distinct ecotypes, inhabiting different lake habitats (reed Phragmites australis and stonewort Chara tomentosa, respectively). In field surveys, we found that these habitats differ markedly in isopod population densities and adult sex ratios. These spatially and temporally demographic differences are likely to affect mating behaviour. We performed behavioural experiments using animals from both the ancestral ecotype (‘‘reed’’ isopods) and from the novel ecotype (‘‘stonewort’’ isopods) population. We found that neither ecotype adjusted their behaviour in response to population density. However, the reed ecotype had a higher intrinsic mating propensity across densities. In contrast to the effects of density, we found ecotype differences in plasticity in response to sex ratio. The stonewort ecotype show pronounced phenotypic plasticity in mating propensity to adult sex ratio, whereas the reed ecotype showed a more canalised behaviour with respect to this demographic factor. We suggest that the lower overall mating propensity and the phenotypic plasticity in response to sex ratio have evolved in the novel stonewort ecotype following invasion of the novel habitat. Plasticity in mating behaviour may in turn have effects on the direction and intensity of sexual selection in the stonewort habitat, which may fuel further ecotype divergence.

New thesis from the lab by Kristina Karlsson, nailing and next lab-meeting

Probably, the proudest moment in the life of PhD-student advisors is when their students has finished his/her thesis. This has now happened once again in our lab, and I am of course extremely happy that my fourth PhD-student Kristina Karlsson has now gotten her PhD-thesis back from the printer. Before Tina, Jessica Abbott (2006), Tom Gosden (2008) and Fabrice Eroukhmanoff (2009) has previously succesfully finished their theses, and I am of course happy to soon be able to kall Tina Dr. Karlsson.

The second proudest moment in the life of the PhD-student advisors is usually the thesis defence. This will take place on Friday November 26 2010 in the "Blue Hall" (Ecology Building). The external opponent on Tinas thesis will be Professor Nina Wedell (Exeter University, UK), and the thesis defence will start at 09.30.

Prof. Wedell will also give an invited research seminar the day before Tinas thesis dissertation (November 25) with the title: "Sexual selection and selfish genetic elements". This talk will take place in the "Red Room" (Ecology Building) at 14.00 on November 25 2010. Needless to say, both Prof. Wedell's talk on November 25 as well as the dissertation ceremony on November 26 are open to the general public and everybody who is interested.

Tina will "nail" her thesis on the "Oak" outside the Biology Library next Wednesday (November 10, 2010) at 15.00. Drinks will be served after this ceremony, and again, it is open to anyone who wish to attend. The same day, our regular lab-meeting will take place as usual (10.15-12.00 in "Darwin"). Anna Runemark will send out a manuscript of ours about sexual selection in mainland and island populations, with the hope to get some input and criticisms. If you do not receive this manuscript, please send Anna an e-mail and she can send you a copy (anna.runemark@zooekol.lu.se). Fika volunteers are particularly welcome to this meeting.