Seminar on population genomics of local adaptation by Chris Wheat on March 27

Posted by Erik Svensson

This week there will be another EXEB-organized event in the form of a seminar by my visiting colleague Chris Wheat from the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University. Chris research group is focussed on a number of central questions in ecology and evolution, including phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation, and he and his students and postdocs focus mainly on butterflies as their main study organisms. They use genomic and transcriptomic tools to answer questions in evolutionary biology, and the title of Chris talk will be:

"Local adaptation in animals: a population genomic perspective"

When: Friday March 27, at 10.30
Where: TBA, but hopefully "Argumentet" or "Darwin" on 2nd floor (Ecology Building)

"Entomology Futures" - Minisymposium on insect ecology and evolution

  Posted by Erik Svensson

Next week EXEB will co-organize a Minisymposium together with The Pheromone Group at the Biology Department in Lund entitled "Entomology Futures", which will focus on insect ecology and evolution.

This symposium is organized in conjunction with the visit by Dr. Niklas Wahlberg from University of Turkku in Finland to our department. Wahlberg is a leading phylogeneticist and systematist who mainly works on butterflies, but has broad ranging research interests in evolutionary biology and entomology.

The symposium is open for everyone interested, although the locality is small and can only take 20-25 attendants, meaning that you should aim to arrive early.

When: Wednesday March 5 2014, 14.00-16.00
Where: Seminar room "Tanken", 1st floor, Ecology Building

Scientific Program

14.00 - 14.30 Niklas Wahlberg: The 215 million years of Lepidoptera diversification: lessons from an ever changing world

14.30 - 15.00 Jadranka Rota: Behavioural ecology and systematics of metalmark moths (Lepidoptera: Choreutidae)

15.00 - 15.20 Coffee break

15.20 - 15.40 Machteld Verzijden: Courtship and mate preference functions are jointly shaped by geographic variation in developmental plasticity and interspecific interactions

15.40 - 16.00 Jessica Abbott: G x E effects of diet on male fitness in Drosophila melanogaster: phenotypic plasticity, or genetic robustness?

lab-meeting on February 23 2011: On speciation and species concepts

The topic of this week's announced lab-meeting has been changed, since the manuscripts that were announced were apparently not ready. Instead, we'll discuss two papers that deal with the evolution of premating isolation and species concepts, respectively. Both are published in Evolution, and they can be downloade here and here.

Time and place as usual: "Darwin" at 13.30-15.00 (Wednesday February 23 2011). Tina will bring fika.
Below are the paper titles, the authors and the Abstracts:

MATE PREFERENCE ACROSS THE SPECIATION CONTINUUM IN A CLADE OF MIMETIC BUTTERFLIES 

Richard M. Merrill, Zachariah Gompert, Lauren M. Dembeck, Marcus R. Kronforst, W. Owen McMillan & Chris D. Jiggins 

Premating behavioral isolation is increasingly recognized as an important part of ecological speciation, where divergent natural selection causes the evolution of reproductive barriers. A number of studies have now demonstrated that traits under divergent natural selection also affect mate preferences. However, studies of single species pairs only capture a snapshot of the speciation process, making it difficult to assess the role of mate preferences throughout the entire process. Heliconius butterflies are well known for their brightly colored mimetic warning patterns, and previous studies have shown that these patterns are also used as mate recognition cues. Here, we present mate preference data for four pairs of sister taxa, representing different stages of divergence, which together allow us to compare diverging mate preferences across the continuum of Heliconius speciation. Using a novel Bayesian approach, our results support a model of ecological speciation in which strong premating isolation arises early, but continues to increase throughout the continuum from polymorphic populations through to “good,” sympatric ecologically divergent species.
 

PROGRESS TOWARD A GENERAL SPECIES CONCEPT

Bernhard Hausdorf

New insights in the speciation process and the nature of “species” that accumulated in the past decade demand adjustments of the species concept. The standing of some of the most broadly accepted or most innovative species concepts in the light of the growing evidence that reproductive barriers are semipermeable to gene flow, that species can differentiate despite ongoing interbreeding, that a single species can originate polyphyletically by parallel evolution, and that uniparental organisms are organised in units that resemble species of biparental organisms is discussed. As a synthesis of ideas in existing concepts and the new insights, a generalization of the genic concept is proposed that defines species as groups of individuals that are reciprocally characterized by features that would have negative fitness effects in other groups and that cannot be regularly exchanged between groups upon contact. The benefits of this differential fitness species concept are that it classifies groups that keep differentiated and keep on differentiating despite interbreeding as species, that it is not restricted to specific mutations or mechanisms causing speciation, and that it can be applied to the whole spectrum of organisms from uni- to biparentals.

On ancestral temperature tolerances, butterfly colonization, Lolita and Vladimir Nabokov

Picture sources from Wikipedia.

This week's lab-meeting will take place at 13.30 on Wednesday February 9 in "Darwin", in accordance with our new schedule. We will discuss a very interesting article from Naomi Pierce's laboratory, which deals with biogeography and multiple "waves" of colonization of Polyommatus blues (butterflies belonging to the family Lycaenidae), as they crossed the Bering's Strait in North America. This beatiful paper integrates ancestral state reconstructions of an ecological important trait (thermal tolerance), biogeography, phylogeny and is of also of litterary interest, as the authors confirm a hypothesis by amateur lepidopterist and famous russian author Nabokov. 

Vladimir Nabokov worked at the museum in Harvard (where Naomi Pierce is active today), during the middle part of the last century. Nabokov is mainly known as an important figure in litterature for his famous but controversial erotic novel "Lolita", about the sexual attraction a middle-age man felt towards a young 12-year old girl. Then and now quite a forbidden topic. But Nabokov was also an excellent amateur entomologist and systematist, whose expertise in butterflies exceeded many professional systematists.

Nabokovs biogeographical hypothesis about multiple waves of colonization of bluets to the New World was based on considerations of genital morphology, but has now proven to be largely correct and validated by molecular data. An excellent example how natural history, systematics and museum expertise can be predictive sciences and complement molecular systematics, rather than being replaced by it. I think our former postdoc and beloved co-worker Shawn Kuchta will love this paper. There is an interesting popular essay in New York Times as well, which might be of interest and worth reading prior to the lab-meeting. You can find that excellent essay by Carl Zimmer here. A blog post on the interesting phylogenetic blog "Dechronization" also comments on Zimmer's paper.  

Below is the Abstract to the original article in Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. that we will discuss on Wednesday. It is an "Open Acess"-article, so just follow the link to the abstract and then you should be able to download it.

Phylogeny and palaeoecology of Polyommatus blue butterflies show Beringia was a climate-regulated gateway to the New World

1. Roger Vila1,2,
2. Charles D. Bell3,
3. Richard Macniven1,4,
4. Benjamin Goldman-Huertas1,5,
5. Richard H. Ree6,
6. Charles R. Marshall1,7,
7. Zsolt Bálint8,
8. Kurt Johnson9,
9. Dubi Benyamini10 and
10. Naomi E. Pierce1,*

+ Author Affiliations

1. ¹Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
2. ²ICREA and Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta 37–49, Barcelona 08003, Spain
3. ³Department of Biological Sciences, University of New Orleans, 2000 Lakeshore Drive, New Orleans, LA 70148, USA
4. ⁴Biogen Idec, 14 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
5. ⁵Department of Ecology and Evolution, The University of Arizona, 424 Biosciences West, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
6. ⁶Department of Botany, Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605, USA
7. ⁷University of California Museum of Paleontology, and Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 1101 Valley Life Sciences Building, Berkeley, CA 02138, USA
8. ⁸Department of Zoology, Hungarian Natural History Museum H-1088, Budapest, Baross utca 13, Hungary
9. ⁹Florida State Collection of Arthropods/McGuire Center, University of Florida Cultural Plaza, Hull Road, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
10. ¹⁰91 Levona Street, Bet Arye, 71947, Israel

1. * Author for correspondence (npierce@oeb.harvard.edu).

Abstract

Transcontinental dispersals by organisms usually represent improbable events that constitute a major challenge for biogeographers. By integrating molecular phylogeny, historical biogeography and palaeoecology, we test a bold hypothesis proposed by Vladimir Nabokov regarding the origin of Neotropical Polyommatus blue butterflies, and show that Beringia has served as a biological corridor for the dispersal of these insects from Asia into the New World. We present a novel method to estimate ancestral temperature tolerances using distribution range limits of extant organisms, and find that climatic conditions in Beringia acted as a decisive filter in determining which taxa crossed into the New World during five separate invasions over the past 11 Myr. Our results reveal a marked effect of the Miocene–Pleistocene global cooling, and demonstrate that palaeoclimatic conditions left a strong signal on the ecology of present-day taxa in the New World. The phylogenetic conservatism in thermal tolerances that we have identified may permit the reconstruction of the palaeoecology of ancestral organisms, especially mobile taxa that can easily escape from hostile environments rather than adapt to them.