Category: Adventures in Academia

Spring is in the air

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to give a Plenary at the ASAB easter meeting. It was great fun to talk about colourful moths and our new work looking at the impact of urbanisation on predator-prey signalling.

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The birds are also now in full breeding mode, with lots of eggs. Stay tuned for the inevitable chick pics!

NVG meeting 2021

Just before the latest lock down the Netherlands Society for Behavioural Biology managed to sneak in it’s annual meeting. I was happy to represent insects with my keynote talk on Chemicals and colours: uncovering the chemical signals maintaining a colour polymorphism, and to get a lovely walk on the beach!

Pokémon and a love of evolution

I was recently interviewed for the Annual review Faculty of Science 2020 here at the UvA. You can read the article online by following the link below. In it I talk about my ongoing research as well as Pokemon and the joys of outreach.

https://ibed.uva.nl/shared/faculteiten/en/faculteit-der-natuurwetenschappen-wiskunde-en-informatica/news/2021/06/emily-burdfield-steel-jaaroverzicht-2020.html

Photo credit: Liesbeth Dingemans (www.liesbethdingemans.nl)

Cool new Review from Chiara

Chiara’s hard work has paid off and her review on the “Evolutionary importance of intraspecific variation in sex pheromones” is now out in Trends in Ecology and Evolution! In it we argue that intraspecific variation in sex pheromone communication channels may have been underestimated, hampering our understanding of how such channels evolve. Check it out here.

Figure 2 from the paper. Some possible routes to speciation through variation in pheromone production and perception inherbivorous insects.

New paper – shiny bugs show negative intersexual genetic correlation in colour

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I couldn’t use this image on the journal cover so I will use it here. New paper just out looking at the heritability of iridescent colour in hibiscus harlequin bugs. The seeds of this were sown back when I was in Australia and it’s really nice to see it out. Find it at the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

More funding success

More good news from the Evolution in Action project. We received EUR 96,000 of funding from Tieteen Tiedotus Ry (i.e. the Finnish Science Information Bureau)!  We will use this money make our workshop materials available for everyone and work with artists Tiina Hirvonen and Michaela Casková to develop new tools and methods to teach evolution in primary and secondary schools.

For more details in Finnish see here.

New warning signal review

What do you get when you combine seven early career researchers, an excellent workshop, one too many beers and far too many skype meetings? A review paper 2 years in the making!

Diversity in warning coloration: selective paradox or the norm? is now out in Biological Reviews. In it we discuss the causes of variation in warning signals, and get carried away with our literature review…