North Atlantic
07/10/10 10:46
It’s funny, I made my start as a population geneticist championing the cause of the North Atlantic Ocean, and I don’t think about it as often these days. Our careers creep in many funny directions, sometimes pulled by funding opportunities and sometimes by fortuitous collaboration.
The above image was snared from the website of Geoff Trussell’s lab at Northeastern University. Geoff is one of my many great colleagues that I know from interactions at the CORONA meetings and every year that I can make it to the Benthic meetings on the east coast (and really, who would want to miss these meetings? Nice one, Jeremy...). Anyway, the image is primarily of the dogwhelk, Nucella lapillus. A really beautiful snail, lots of color variation, interesting genetic patterns, part of my dissertation.
The work is finally being updated, with modern statistical (ABC) approaches, by my good friend and colleague Mike Hickerson and his student and postdoc (particularly lead author Katriina Ilves). The results are clearly starting to change. There are taxonomic controls on who survived glaciation and who didn’t - on the east coast of North America, at least - rather than larval life history controls, if the statistics tell the whole story. What is amazing is how big of an impact that paper had in 2001, and I suspect this paper will have a big impact in 2010.... and yet we still clearly know so little. Most of these species have still only been assayed for mitochondrial variation. The time will come soon when we can apply for funding to tackle the same community using variation across the entire genome.
The above image was snared from the website of Geoff Trussell’s lab at Northeastern University. Geoff is one of my many great colleagues that I know from interactions at the CORONA meetings and every year that I can make it to the Benthic meetings on the east coast (and really, who would want to miss these meetings? Nice one, Jeremy...). Anyway, the image is primarily of the dogwhelk, Nucella lapillus. A really beautiful snail, lots of color variation, interesting genetic patterns, part of my dissertation.
The work is finally being updated, with modern statistical (ABC) approaches, by my good friend and colleague Mike Hickerson and his student and postdoc (particularly lead author Katriina Ilves). The results are clearly starting to change. There are taxonomic controls on who survived glaciation and who didn’t - on the east coast of North America, at least - rather than larval life history controls, if the statistics tell the whole story. What is amazing is how big of an impact that paper had in 2001, and I suspect this paper will have a big impact in 2010.... and yet we still clearly know so little. Most of these species have still only been assayed for mitochondrial variation. The time will come soon when we can apply for funding to tackle the same community using variation across the entire genome.