Sozos Michaelides successfully defended his DPhil thesis on Nov 20th at the University of Oxford. A clean pass without corrections! The external examiner Dr Jason Kolbe from Rhode Island University made the viva both challenging and fun – just like it should be. Celebrations continued well into the Oxford night with many familiar faces from the EGI and the Department of Zoology showing up to celebrate Dr Sozos.

Sozos’ DPhil thesis explores the phylogeography and genetics of colonization in wall lizards. Wall lizards have been introduced into many locations in England and Sozos has used genetic data to establish the origin and reconstruct the introduction pathways of 23 populations. This revealed at least nine independent origins of wall lizards in England and many secondary introductions. Sozos document origin-dependent loss of genetic diversity in non-native populations, which in some instances is accompanied with signs of severe inbreeding depression. The thesis provides a comprehensive study of the genetics of native and non-native wall lizards and opens up for further investigations of the causes and consequences of admixture and the study of local adaptation during range expansion.

Old and new collaborators – from Australia, England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal – came to Lund for two days 16th – 17th of November to share their results, ideas and future research plans on wall lizards. Everyone’s dedication and enthusiasm made the meeting a real success and discussions continued over drinks long after dinner.

Our different backgrounds, expertise, geographic locations and a willingness to share and discuss work in progress make this a fantastic network to be part of. New ideas emerged, new collaborations formed, and we are happy to see expansion of several ongoing projects, from the evolution of phenotypic polymorphism to the genomics of diversification and local adaptation.

We thank everyone who came a long way, everyone here in Lund, and especially Hanna for organizing it all. We hope to see many of you again already next spring!

Below: Daniele, Nathalie, Stefano and Roberto enjoying some refreshments after a long day at the meeting

Participants of the meeting:
Lund University & University of Oxford: Tobias Uller, Weizhao Yang, Nathalie Feiner, Antonio Cordero, Reinder Radersma, Sozos Michaelides, Hanna Laakkonen, Bea Andersson
University of Tasmania: GeoffWhile, Hannah MacGregor
University of Pavia: Roberto Sacchi
University of Pisa: Marco Zuffi
Natural History Museum of Milan: Stefano Scali
Station d’Ecologie Expérimentale du CNRS: Fabien Aubret
University of Valencia: Pau Carazo
CIBIO: Guillem Perez I de Lanuza, Catarina Pinho, Miguel Carretero (TBC), Daniele Salvi (TBC)
University of Trier: Joscha Beninde

Brief summary of Waddington reading group by Nathalie Feiner

“Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne…“

Hermann Hesse in Stufen, 1941

„A magic dwells in each beginning…“

Indeed, it does feel kind of special to be part of the ‘early developmental stages’ of the Uller group. We are an assembly of six people with very different (scientific) backgrounds and experiences. All of us moved to Lund earlier this year, and it’s therefore a fresh start for all of us in many different ways. Our diverse fields of expertise (from biogeography, life history evolution, and genomics of adaptation to classical embryology) are of course the strength of our group, but it also requires a certain ‘tuning-in’ phase and communication across diverse research areas needs some practice.

We decided that a reading group would provide us with an informal occasion to get the group going, and to discuss our ideas of how we think evolution actually works. We chose Conrad Hal Waddington’s ‘The Strategy of the Gene’ from 1957 for several reasons. One is that Waddington’s book tries very much the same that we are trying with our research right now, more than 50 years later, namely the synthesis of ecology, development and evolution. By delving into his book, we are aiming to trace back the conceptual origins of our own research agendas. Another reason is Waddington’s focus on epigenetic phenomena. Being very sceptical towards the prevailing neo-Darwinian obsession with assigning absolute control to genes, Waddington was seeking other causal explanations for both development and evolution. It seems like Waddington was sharing very much the same concerns as modern researchers pleading for an extended evolutionary synthesis. Again, this idea is reflected in two of our main lines of research, namely non-genetic inheritance in Daphnia, and phenotypic plasticity in Anolis lizards. Hence, many good reasons to read this book!

The reading group was run as follows: we met up on 4 afternoons to discuss each one chapter of the book. We also had Per Lundberg and Pablo Salmon as honorary guests who contributed interesting viewpoints to the discussion. To get accustomed to Swedish culture, we adopted the local rite of having ‘fika’ (=eating lots of sweets) during the meetings. One person took the lead in outlining the major arguments per chapter, and additional literature was consulted, mostly to get a feeling for how Waddington has been interpreted by the scientific community (see WaddingtonReadingGroup).

In summary, I think we can safely conclude that the reading group was a fruitful exercise and that we can all learn from each other. At least the heavy usage of the blackboard suggests that we exchanged a lot of ideas and thoughts and it was surely a nice way a getting to know each other a little bit better.

I hope this was not the last reading group – suggestions for other books are highly welcome!

A new paper in Ecology Letters show that allopatric divergence under sexual selection can create asymmetric introgression upon secondary contact. This does not only demonstrate that sexual selection is an important driver of hybridization, but also raises interesting questions about how sexual characters can be transferred from one lineage to another.

This paper is a collaborative effort between ourselves and teams throughout Europe who have contributed samples or genetic data to allow us to test how well predictions from experimental enclosures hold up in the wild.

Read the paper here.