Sunday 23 October 2016

Week 7: Mimics and maniacs!

I want to start off by saying that everyone should now be able to make a comment with or without an account. I have also put a survey on the website and some ratings on each post, please feel free to comment with questions and rate so that I can improve my posts, I wont bite!  
Really, I wont bite!

Linux penguin, Tux
This week started off with some great new that I had officially been accepted onto the PhD program. Now I bet a lot of you are asking, having you already been working for around 2 months and you were not officially accepted? Nope, not until this Monday where I found out that the project plan that I told you all about last week had been accepted. So now not only am I an employee for Nord university I am also a student (yes I know that sounds strange)!

During this week of work my energy was very low, this is because I am temporarily a single parent for the next few weeks, however I have been getting work done as best as I can. Most of the week consisted of reading and I have nearly covered most of the literature on my specific topic. I was also preparing my computer for the course I will be going on in two weeks time near Gothenburg. I had to install several bioinformatic programs along with installing a virtual computer so that I could run Linux on my Windows PC.

larval fish(mimics) mimicking jellyfish/gelatinous larvae
 (models) (Greer et al. 2016) .
This week was also time for another journal club, with this week’s presentation being done by Amalia Mailli on the paper “Larval fishes utilize Batesian mimicry as a survival strategy in the plankton” (Greer et al. 2016).  Batesian mimicry is a form of mimicry where a harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signs of a harmful species for protection from predation. In this paper, they looked at larval fish(mimics) mimicking jellyfish/gelatinous larvae (models) for protection (See image). The jellyfish larvae are poisonous to predator fish and will be avoided, so the mimics are protected from predation. There are many crazy different examples and is almost as interesting as hybridization. There is so much more I could talk about on this topic but due to my low energy levels I believe it is best to keep it short, instead I will link some interesting sites at the bottom of this post.

One of the many  interesting examples of  Batesian mimicry,
one which I have always thought about as a child, the hover fly
and the wasps! 1- German Wasp, 2 - Hoverfly, 3 - Hoverfly,
4 - Wasp Beetle, 5 - Sawfly, 6 - Hoverfly.
http://alexhyde.photoshelter.com/image/I0000fkOVUVljQXg
Finally, in my free time I have been working to improve my scientific writing and my portfolio. It is a piece of side work that I am hoping to submit for an Evolutionary Digest and once my work has been submitted I will go into more details. Once again, thank you so much for everyone who is reading my posts, please comment and leave feedback, I would very much like to hear what you think, but until next week, I hope you all have a great one!    







Interesting sites:

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