Report from Uppsala: competition, ecological and non-ecological speciation

 Every now and then, one has to visit your enemy and competitor, as Richard Nixon realized in the early 1970'ties, when he visited The People's Republic of China, and shaked hand with communist leader Chairman Mao Zedong (see above). I imagine Nixon felt a bit unsecure when he, as an american, visited a traditional enemy on his home ground, almost like sticking your head in to the lion's den.

Uppsala and Lund Universities, being the oldest and most prestigious universities in Sweden, are often seen as competitors, but luckily we have not been close to armed conflict, like the US and China, and we are hopefully a bit closer to each other than Nixon and Mao. I was therefore honoured when I was offered to sit the thesis committé of Niclas Vallin, one of my colleage Anna Qvarnströms PhD-students, together with Prof. Andrew Hendry from McGill University (Canada). You probably remember that Andrew was also the opponent of my student Fabrice Eroukhmanoff in Lund, a couple of years ago, and then Anna Qvarnström was in the thesis-committe.

The current thesis by Vallin dealt with interspecific competition between flycatcher species on the island of Öland, and was a classical experimental field study which (almost refreshingly!) did not have a single chapter on molecular genetics, which is quite rare these days. Andrew writes a more thorough report about the thesis and its content on his research group blog "Eco-Evo-Evo-Eco".

On Thursday last week, Andrew and I also gave tandem talks at the Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC) about the importance of ecological speciation, and its alternatives. We both took a critical look at ecological speciation, albeit from different angles, and Andrew writes more about it here.Briefly, Andrew questioned how often ecologically divergent selection leads to the completion of speciation, something which he calls "ecological non-speciation" , whereas I attacked ecological speciation with some examples of radiations which are unlikely to have speciated through ecological means and niche-based divergent selection, which we can call "non-ecological speciation".  

After long and scientific discussions over beers, wine and "Bäversnaps", Andrew and I agreed that we almost understood nothing, and that more research is clearly needed. I therefore would like to take the opportunity to, once again, advertise the ESF-workshop next year on non-adaptive and non-ecological speciation that will take place in Lund next year, on August 18 2012.

Lastly, I have to say I really enjoyed going to Uppsala (in spite of our historical antagonisms!), and to participate both in the thesis-committe of Niklas Vallin, and listen also to the thesis-defence of another PhD-student, Paolo Innocenti, who has worked on the transcriptomic consequences of sexual conflict in Drosophila. Interestingly, Paolo has worked both with Jessica Abbott and Tom Gosden, my two first PhD-students, so this is really a small world. And although Lund might still be the best university in Sweden, there is clearly room also for Uppsala, especially when they open up and collaborate with people from Lund.

Our research is featured in TREE and we get a cover photo!

In the latest issue of Trends in Ecology & Evolution, the cover photo is a couple of mating damselflies (Ischnura elegans), one of our favourite study species. It is of course very pleasing to see both this photo on the cover, and the flattering coverage of our research in a a review article by Charlie K. Cornwallis and Tobias Uller, entitled Towards an evolutionary ecology of sexual traits. Cornwallis and Uller discusses a number of recent articles about the dynamics of sexual selection over several generations, including a paper published by Tom Gosden and me entitled Spatial and temporal dynamics in a sexual selection mosaic (in Evolution, 2008).

Here is the abstract of the review article by Cornwallis and Uller:

References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.

Charlie K. Cornwallis^a, and Tobias Uller^a

^a Edward Grey Institute, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, UK, OX1 3PS

Empirical studies of sexual traits continue to generate conflicting results, leading to a growing awareness that the current understanding of this topic is limited. Here we argue that this is because studies of sexual traits fail to encompass three important features of evolution. First, sexual traits evolve via natural selection of which sexual selection is just one part. Second, selection on sexual traits fluctuates in strength, direction and form due to spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity. Third, phenotypic plasticity is ubiquitous and generates selection and responses to selection within and across generations. A move from purely gene-focused theories of sexual selection towards research that explicitly integrates development, ecology and evolution is necessary to break the stasis in research on sexual traits.

Way to go, Tom!!! Congratulations to Marie Curie-postdoc

For those of you who did not already know this, our beloved former co-worker Tom Gosden received a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the "Marie Curie"-programme. I wrote a blogpost also about this at the CAnMove-blogg, which you can read here. This is good news, not only for Tom, but also for me and our entire research laboratory, since Tom will return to Lund in the third year of his postdoc, with the aim to build up a Drosophila-laboratory here, in collaboration with me.

Tom's brave decision to move from a field-based evolutionary ecology system (Ischnura elegans, his thesis-work) to a more classical lab-based system of Drosophila will most likely pay off in the future. Hopefully, in the future we can combine concepts and methods from the Drosophila-world with the Ischnura-system, particularly if we one day are able to characterize the colour morph-locus of I. elegans at the DNA-sequence level.

Although we are not there yet, Maren Wellenreuther will next year start on her Marie Curie postdoc project that will bring us closer to that long-term goal, with the primary (and more realistic) aim to first produce a linkage map and find a molecular marker of the morph-locus. Luckily, we have molecular ecology expert help from Bengt Hansson in this hunt for the magic morph gene.