Tag Archives: fitness

Can birdsong signal immune gene quality?

Posted on February 25, 2018 by hageyt

This post is by MSU postdoc Joel Slade.  “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!” – I wake up to the dreaded sound of my alarm clock at 3:45 am in my cabin. Even though it’s mid-April at the Queen’s University Biological Station in Elgin … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work, Notes from the Field | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can birdsong signal immune gene quality?

Evolution of Reliable Signals

Posted on July 16, 2016 by hageyt

This Evolution 101 post is by MSU grad student Thassyo Pinto The ownership of goods such as luxury cars, expensive boats and conspicuous consumption, and showing it off to others, transmits a signal informing that owner is capable of bearing expenses. … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution 101 | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Evolution of Reliable Signals

Manipulating evolution to conserve species

Posted on February 22, 2016 by hageyt

This post is by MSU Postdoc Sarah Fitzpatrick working at the Kellogg Biological Station Consider a native fish population in a small headwater stream with low genetic diversity due to genetic drift and founder effect (loss of variation that occurs when … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Using fitness landscapes to visualize evolution in action

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Danielle Whittaker

BEACONites Bjørn Østman and Randy Olson created a video to visualize evolution in action using fitness landscapes. Read about it below! Fitness landscapes were invented by Sewall Wright in 1932. They map fitness, or reproductive success, of individual organisms as a function … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

BEACON Researchers at Work: Measuring natural selection in flowers

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU graduate student Raffica La Rosa.  Novel traits differ qualitatively from the characters from which they arise, and are generally thought to be adaptive. I study adaptive novel traits by combining … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

BEACON Researchers at Work: Survival of the Rarest

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU postdoc Noah Ribeck. We are all taught the basic tenet of evolution by natural selection: occasionally an individual is born with a mutation that improves its chances of having … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Goldilocks and the Three Mutators

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Danielle Whittaker

This blog post is by MSU graduate student Mike Wiser. Many things in life seem to follow the Goldilocks principle: both too much and too little of something can be worse than striking a balance somewhere in between. Goldilocks saw … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Evolution 101: Fitness Landscapes

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s Evolution 101 blog post is by MSU postdoc Arend Hintze and MSU graduate student Randy Olson. While fitness landscapes are generally thought to be more of a theoretical construct, they are in fact quite tangible and underly every … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution 101 | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Evolution 101: Epistasis

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s Evolution 101 post is by MSU postdoc Bjørn Østman. Bjørn also blogs at Pleiotropy. What is epistasis? Epistasis is a measure of the strength of epistatic interactions. Epistatic interactions are non-additive interactions between alleles, loci, or mutations. That is, … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution 101 | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Evolution 101: Maternal Effects

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s Evolution 101 blog post is by MSU graduate student Emily Weigel. This is a moment to thank your mom. Mothers have more of an effect on their offspring than one might first think. In addition to the DNA, … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution 101 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment