Joint lab meeting with the Animal Flight Lab

On behalf of Sophia Engel:

Next week we’ll have a joint lab meeting with the Animal Flight Lab. Please note: It will take place Monday (25 January) at 9:00h in “Argumentet” (not 9:30h!). We will discuss flight performance of insects and the effect of ambient temperature. Ectotherm animals are, of course, much more sensitive to ambient temperature than endotherms, with important consequences not only for activity patterns but also for body proportions, muscle physiology, and aerodynamics. Berwaerts and van Dyck (Oecologia (2004) 141: 536–545) studied take-off performance of butterflies under different thermal conditions and found that a certain wing shape is more beneficial at optimal than at cold temperatures. Frazier et al. (2008, The Journal of Experimental Biology 211, 2116-2122) show that in drosophila flies even the thermal history of an individual may affect flight capabilities later on in life. Based on their results, they suggest that developmental plasticity may push the thermal performance envelope farther in the direction of the stress (in this case, cold temperatures), rather than optimizing performance to the exact rearing conditions. I think these papers will give us plenty of discussion material.

Please contact Sophia by email if you wish to have a pdf version of the papers, since it is impossible to include them in this post: Sophia.Engel@teorekol.lu.se.

Interesting video about dragonfly migration over the oceans

Whatch this very interesting video by Charles Anderson, that is well worth watching. It deals with the newly discovered trans-continental dragonfly migration between India and Africa and describes how it was discovered. Enjoy!

This week there will not be a lab-meeting the coming Wednesday (20 January), since I will be in Germany, giving an invited lecture at Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, which is part of the famous Humboldt University. This university has had many famous students during its 200 year existence, among them Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Karl Liebknecht. The natural history part of the museum is well known for its paleontological collections, particularly one of the finest specimens of Archaeopteryx - the "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds. I will of course return with a detailed report when I get back.

For next week (25-29 January), the aim is to have a lab-meeting on Monday 25 January at 09.30 in "Argumentet" about insect flight and wing morphology. Sophia Engel will be responsible for announcing this seminar by putting up a bloggpost with a link to the paper(-s) that we will discuss. This will be a joint meeting with Anders Hedenströms group "Animal Flight Lab". Sophia should put up the post well ahead of Monday, preferably later this week, with some help of more experienced bloggers in the group, if necessary.

PLoS ONE gets listed in Web of Science and will get its impact factor (IF)

Some good news for the Open Acess-movement in general, and for those who have published in PLoS one in particular, particularly Tom Gosden and Fabrice Eroukhmanoff (alongside with me): PLoS ONE will now be listed in Web of Science, meaning that your articles, as well as all future articles in this journal, will now be searchable and appear in ISI:s databases. This is very good news, as the lack of inclusion by PLoS ONE in ISI has been somewhat negative when trying to convince people to publish there: scientists are quite conservative and hesitant to publish if they are not absolutely confident that their papers will be read widely and cited.

It does not matter to argue, in my experience, that Web of Science, is not the only database and not necessarily the best or most inclusive one. PubMed, for instance, is much faster and better, and Scopus covers many more journals than WoS. Many scientists do not seem aware of the fact that these search engines and data-bases are commercially driven, and thus not driven and organized by scientists, with the primary goal of helping scientists. Thompson/ISI simply happen to be one of the oldest data-bases, and the one which claims credit for the term "Impact Factor"(IF), and very questionable measure of journal impact which has recently been criticized by many.

Putting these issues against IF aside for a moment, PLoS ONE will, as a side-effect, soon also get its first IF, since it was needed to be included in ISI before that was possible. It will of course also be interesting to see which IF PLoS ONE will get, although I would not primarily use that as the only or most important criterion where to publish. It is interesting that it took three years before ISI accepted to include PLoS ONE in their data-bases, given that there are many low-impact journals like Odonatologica which has long been included in ISI.

I suspect, although I do not have any proof for this, that ISI are nervous for the new publication model that PLoS ONE advocates, where perceived impact and "novelty" is played down and there is more emphasis on technical quality. In the end, this might hurt the commercial interests of ISI if scientists start to increasingly become more critical to journal-level IF:s (rightly so!). In a better future, there will hopefully be more emphasis on scientific content and article-level metrics of authors, rather than on journal-level metrics, which largely belongs to the pre-internet era and sends out a message that journals like (say) Evolution or American Naturalist are not as important as we, in the field of evolutionary biology, generally think that they are.

Lab-meeting on good genes and ecological speciation January 13 2009

It is time for lab-meetings again, and what would be more suitable to start with than a theoretical paper about "good genes" and speciation? You will find this paper here, and it has recently been published in Science by van Doorn et al. You will find the abstract below:

On the Origin of Species by Natural and Sexual Selection

G. Sander van Doorn,^1,2,*, Pim Edelaar,^3,4,5,* Franz J. Weissing³

Ecological speciation is considered an adaptive response to selection for local adaptation. However, besides suitable ecological conditions, the process requires assortative mating to protect the nascent species from homogenization by gene flow. By means of a simple model, we demonstrate that disruptive ecological selection favors the evolution of sexual preferences for ornaments that signal local adaptation. Such preferences induce assortative mating with respect to ecological characters and enhance the strength of disruptive selection. Natural and sexual selection thus work in concert to achieve local adaptation and reproductive isolation, even in the presence of substantial gene flow. The resulting speciation process ensues without the divergence of mating preferences, avoiding problems that have plagued previous models of speciation by sexual selection.

Time and place as usual: "Darwin" at 10.15 (immediately after the "Pheromone group"). It would be great if you could respond below if you will come (or not!), as I am not sure how many are back in town. Any fika-volunteer?

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

On behalf of myself and my research laboratory, I wish you all (PhD-students, undergraduates, postdocs and senior collaborators) a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Although the official celebration of the "Darwin Year" is now over, for us evolutionary biologists every year will indeed be another "Darwin Year", including 2010. I am looking forward to some exciting new research news, both in this lab and in the scientific community as a whole. Take care!

WWDD (What Would Darwin Do?)

Hello Everyone! On this blog we've discussed the value of publishing in Open Access journals at least a couple times, and it general the idea has received strong support (including from me, if I remember correctly). Alan Moore (who was Tom's Ph.D. opponent) just published an article in support society-based journals. As a long-term member of many societies, I found Moore's article spoke to many things that are important to me, and he makes excellent points. For example, someone always pays, even if the article is freely available. More importantly, supporting societies has a lot of academic and cultural value. We all enjoy and benefit from the ESEB meetings, and from the promotion of science (in the USA, we need all the help we can get getting facts about Evolution out!!!!!!). Another interesting point: we provide free reviews to support academic societies (a reasonable volunteer contribution), but we also provide free reviews to open access, society-less journals, and are thereby padding the bottom line of the publishing industry (people who almost certainly make more money than I do). Why do this expert service for free for industry? I may not review for society-less journals any longer, unless they pay me.

I remember a couple years ago there was a talk at Lund about Open Access and its virtues from the perspective of a librarian. It was an excellent, convincing talk, and I enjoyed it. Afterwards, someone asked about the societies and how they fit into this. The answer, which did not satisfy me, was that they'd have to "do something else" (I'm quoting from long memory here -- at any rate, the response was terse and unsympathetic to the concerns of society-based journals). I agree with Moore that the academic societies are of extraordinary value to us as researchers and academics (more than most realize, I would venture), and deserving of our support in terms of finances and as a first choice when be publish.

Now, let me cover my head and run....

On ecological speciation, tempo and mode of evolution

The coming week's lab-meeting (16 December 2009), will be the last one for 2009. Due to teaching obligations, I would like the meeting to start somewhat later than usual, at 10.30. The topic of this week's lab-meeting will be speciation, and we will discuss two papers published in 2009 in and Nature and Science (abstracts are provided below):

Phylogenies reveal new interpretation of speciation and the Red Queen

Chris Venditti¹, Andrew Meade¹ & Mark Pagel^1,2

(Nature advance online publication)

Evidence for Ecological Speciation and Its Alternative

Schluter Dolph

Science (2009) 323: 737-741

These two papers are interesting, because they reflect radically different views on the causes of speciation and the drivers of speciation processes. I therefore thought it would be interesting to discuss them with this in mind, and contrast their different underlying viewpoints against each other. Who is correct and who is wrong? Or are both correct, and if so, in what domains?

We will thus meet at 10.30 in "Darwin" on Wednesday 16 December. Any fika-volunteer?

Abstracts follow below:

Chris Venditti¹, Andrew Meade¹ & Mark Pagel^1,2

Phylogenies reveal new interpretation of speciation and the Red Queen

The Red Queen¹ describes a view of nature in which species continually evolve but do not become better adapted. It is one of the more distinctive metaphors of evolutionary biology, but no test of its claim that speciation occurs at a constant rate² has ever been made against competing models that can predict virtually identical outcomes, nor has any mechanism been proposed that could cause the constant-rate phenomenon. Here we use 101 phylogenies of animal, plant and fungal taxa to test the constant-rate claim against four competing models. Phylogenetic branch lengths record the amount of time or evolutionary change between successive events of speciation. The models predict the distribution of these lengths by specifying how factors combine to bring about speciation, or by describing how rates of speciation vary throughout a tree. We find that the hypotheses that speciation follows the accumulation of many small events that act either multiplicatively or additively found support in 8% and none of the trees, respectively. A further 8% of trees hinted that the probability of speciation changes according to the amount of divergence from the ancestral species, and 6% suggested speciation rates vary among taxa. By comparison, 78% of the trees fit the simplest model in which new species emerge from single events, each rare but individually sufficient to cause speciation. This model predicts a constant rate of speciation, and provides a new interpretation of the Red Queen: the metaphor of species losing a race against a deteriorating environment is replaced by a view linking speciation to rare stochastic events that cause reproductive isolation. Attempts to understand species-radiations³ or why some groups have more or fewer species should look to the size of the catalogue of potential causes of speciation shared by a group of closely related organisms rather than to how those causes combine.

Schluter Dolph

Natural selection commonly drives the origin of species, as Darwin initially claimed. Mechanisms of speciation by selection fall into two broad categories: ecological and mutation-order. Under ecological speciation, divergence is driven by divergent natural selection between environments, whereas under mutation-order speciation, divergence occurs when different mutations arise and are fixed in separate populations adapting to similar selection pressures. Tests of parallel evolution of reproductive isolation, trait-based assortative mating, and reproductive isolation by active selection have demonstrated that ecological speciation is a common means by which new species arise. Evidence for mutation-order speciation by natural selection is more limited and has been best documented by instances of reproductive isolation resulting from intragenomic conflict. However, we still have not identified all aspects of selection, and identifying the underlying genes for reproductive isolation remains challenging.