Episode 121: Stickle-back to the future: experimental evolution in nature (with Alison Derry and Andrew Hendry)

Can we study evolution in the wild? Are some species “super-evolvers”? On the episode, we talk with Alison Derry, a professor of biology at the University of Quebec in Montreal, and Andrew Hendry, a professor in the Department of Biology at McGill University, Canada. This episode is the second we’ve done on the team’s work, and Andrew was also a guest on our first episode in the series. This conversation was recorded live in front of an audience at Kenai Peninsula College, in Soldotna, Alaska. The college is just a few miles from the lakes where Alison, Andrew, and many of their colleagues and students carry out experiments on threespine sticklebacks. We ask Alison and Andrew about their research on the rapid evolution of these fish, which were recently reintroduced to the lakes, and how the introduction of two distinct stickleback ecotypes are affecting the evolution of zooplankton in the lakes. We also discuss the central position of sticklebacks in the food web and how the sticklebacks are impacting the ecosystems now as well as how they likely impacted the lakes in the evolutionary past. Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri. Audio from Hunter Morrison at KDLL.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1123/thumbnail.jp

Episode 088: How I learned to stop worrying and follow the data (with Timothy Caulfield)

How much coffee should we drink? Is there a scientific way to have a healthy, happy life? And how do we distinguish scientific sense from nonsense? In this episode, we talk with author and University of Alberta professor Timothy Caulfield about decision making and misinformation in the modern world. A surprising number of “common sense” decisions that people make in their daily lives are not actually backed by strong scientific evidence, and Tim strives to debunk these in his recent book, “Relax, Dammit!: A User\u27s Guide to the Age of Anxiety”. Among other things, we discuss with Tim how often we should check email and how risky it really is for kids to walk to school. We also talk about how science communication can be used to curb misinformation, and Tim shares his dos and don’ts for effective scicomm.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1089/thumbnail.jp

Episode 127: Devo-lutionary theory (with Scott Gilbert and Tobias Uller)

What role does development play in evolution? How can biology incorporate a broader, more complex definition of what it means to be an organism? In this episode, we talk with Scott Gilbert and Tobias Uller, two of the authors who wrote Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity. Scott is a professor emeritus in Biology at Swarthmore College, and Tobias is a professor of Biodiversity and Evolution at Lund University. In Evolution Evolving, Scott, Tobias and their co-authors (Kevin Lala, Natalie Feiner, and Marcus Feldman), argue that development plays an underappreciated, but central role in evolution. One concept they emphasize is of “developmental bias”, which is the capacity of organisms to generate certain kinds of traits and trait combinations more than others. Scott and Tobias argue that such developmental mechanisms can provide a more robust explanation for patterns of evolutionary change than traditional theory. However, they also provide a very broad definition of development in the book, and challenge readers to consider the complex interactions and feedbacks between an organism and the environment that shape an organism’s evolution. Could this be the start of a new devo-lutionary theory? Listen and decide for yourself. Cover art: Keating Shahmehri.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1129/thumbnail.jp

Episode 118: Dog in the machine (with Andy Kern)

How should biologists deal with the massive amounts of population genetic data that are now routinely available? Will AIs make biologists obsolete? In this episode, we talk with Andy Kern, an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon. Andy has spent much of his career applying machine learning methods in population genetics. We talk with him about the fundamental questions that population genetics aims to answer and about older theoretical and empirical approaches. We then turn to the promise of machine learning methods, which are increasingly being used to estimate population genetic structure, patterns of migration, and the geographic origins of trafficked samples. These methods are powerful because they can leverage high dimensional genomic data. Andy also talks about the implications of AI and machine learning for the future of biology research. Cover photo: Keating Shahmehrihttps://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1120/thumbnail.jp

Episode 129: Beaks and (fitness) peaks (with Trevor Price)

Which factors lead to the evolution of reproductive isolation? What role does hybridization play in speciation? Why are there so many bird species in the tropics? In this episode, we host Trevor Price, a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a Fellow of the Royal Society to talk about the evolutionary process driving speciation in birds. Our chat covers the decades he spent studying birds on the Galapagos Islands and in the Himalayas. We also discuss the challenges of doing this research in the wild,why bird distributions are limited along elevational gradients, and a bit about the role of phenotypic plasticity in evolution. Cover art: Keating Shahmehri.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1131/thumbnail.jp

Episode 124: Spiny, but social (with Aubrey Kelly)

What are spiny mice and why are they so social? What about their brains makes them gregarious? Might network neuroscience be a useful framework for understanding spiny mice behavior? On this episode, we talk with Aubrey Kelly, an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Emory University. Aubrey is a behavioral neuroscientist working on many vertebrate species, mostly in regards to their social behaviors. In our conversation with her, we focus on one of her main study species, the spiny mouse. Spiny mice have been found in groups of over sixty in the wild, and individual mice have “best friends,” another mouse they prefer to spend time with. Aubrey talks about the neural and hormonal underpinnings of their social behavior and her growing interests in network neuroscience. This episode was supported by a grant to Aubrey from the National Science Foundation. Cover photo: Keating Shahmehrihttps://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1126/thumbnail.jp

Episode 120: Shifting mutational landscapes (with Deepa Agashe)

What is mutation bias and how can scientists study it? How does changing a population’s mutation bias influence its evolutionary trajectory? In this episode, we talk with Deepa Agashe, an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. We first talk with Deepa about mutation bias and how she uses E. coli to understand it. We then focus on a 2023 PNAS paper about the fitness effects of experimentally changing the mutation bias in E. coli. In this research, Deepa and her team used a strain (MutY) of bacteria containing a mutation that knocks out an important DNA repair enzyme. They then isolated subsequent single mutations produced within both MutY and wildtype lines and studied the fitness effects of those mutations. Surprisingly, more than a third of mutations in the mutant lines were beneficial, and often across several different environments. Zooming out, the big picture is that shifts in mutation bias seem to generate new kinds of mutations that weren’t previously accessible to lineages, and a greater fraction of those may be beneficial in some circumstances. Cover photo: Keating Shahmehrihttps://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1122/thumbnail.jp