Hello again
everyone, I hope everyone enjoyed my big catch up blog last week and now I will
try to get back to a normal upload. However, last week did not start off so
smoothly as I was ill on Monday, but I was back to work on Tuesday.
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| Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco Lucca (Barga) in Italy |
This week I
have found out that I was given a place at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and Gordon Research Seminar (GRS)
which were recommended to me by Roger Butlin, a leading expert in speciation.
The conference and seminars topic is speciation
which is very important for my research and should provide me some useful
contacts for the near future. It will be held at Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco Lucca (Barga) in Italy.
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| Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic |
After
finding out this good news I was hit with the unfortunate news that I could not
receive a credit card through work due to me not having a “permanent” personal
identification number here in Norway. I also cannot get this number until I
have passed my trial period on my contract which is set at 6 months. So, I was
having problems paying for the workshops, travel, and courses however thanks to a work around I have managed to get this sorted and I am very excited for my trip to Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic.
I was also
lucky enough to have a skype call with Roger Butlin, where we discussed my
project a little and my upcoming ethics work. Roger, described speciation in a
way that I had never thought about before and had really redirected my energy
on a more constructive path. The point
he made about speciation was that the time it takes to complete the process for
example in birds is around 10 million years. The length of time of speciation is
also similar to the average interval between species events (7 million years for
birds based on phylogeny) on a
lineage and so most lineages are in the process of speciation most of the time.
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| A nice example of Fucus distichus |
I was also
in contact with James Coyer an expert on Fucus who I have had previous contact
with and asked some more about species and speciation in the Fucus genus (The Fucus distichus complex). He
explained that the Fucus distichus complex is comprised of several morphs, each of which has been
described as a separate species or subspecies. The morphs seem to be stable
from generation to generation and in common garden studies, yet hybridization is common. On the
basis of a mtDNA ITS spacer, his
research had determined that there was no difference among the morphs and
suggested that they all be considered F. distichus. This was verified by another
study using 13 nuclear markers. Using
this information and what I have learnt from Roger Butlin I will attempt to
write a nice little paper on the species concept and tie it nicely into my
research and the genus I love so much Fucus!
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| This was the last bit of sunlight we will see in Bodø this winter. |
I
understand that this blog has been rather short as it was quite a lot of random
administrative work this week. However, I have used some quite in-depth
scientific terms in this blog post which I will leave some links explain them
in the bottom of this post(found in bold) if you are confused and want to learn
more and some other interesting links! I hope you all have a great week and I
will see you all in the next blog post!
Interesting links:
Highlighted words:
Speciation –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation
Phylogeny/Phylogenetic
tree – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tree
Fucus distichus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucus_distichus
Morphs/Polymorphism
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism_(biology)
Hybridization
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_(biology)
mtDNA ITS
spacer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_DNA
Nuclear
marker – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marker_gene
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