I spent the the new year in Brazil as part of my visit to the labs of Celso Omoto and Alberto Soares Corrêa in Piracicaba. It was a wonderful visit and will hopefully shed some new light on the sexual communication of invasive moth species!
Exciting news! I’ll be starting my new position as Assistant Professor in Chemical Ecology at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) in the University of Amsterdam in January 2019.
More news to come on potential job openings. Of course the biggest challenge right now is finding an apartment in Amsterdam…
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.
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…
The first paper from my time as an Endeavour fellow in Australia is out! Learn about warning signal plasticity in hibiscus harlequin bugs over at Evolutionary Ecology
New paper out now (well it doesn’t feel that new to me but such is the peer review system). De novo synthesis of chemical defenses in an aposematic moth.
I’m currently in Australia(!) and will be here for the next 4 months on an Endeavour Fellowship, working on the ecological and genetic basis of colour variation in Hibiscus Harlequin Bugs (Tectocoris diophthalmus). I’m based at Macquarie University in Sydney, working with Mariella Herberstein and Kate Umbers.
Hibiscus Harlequin Bugs have contrasting pattern made up of orange colouration and iridescent blue patches that vary considerably in size between individuals and populations. Northern populations have far less blue colouration, and may even be completely orange. Furthermore this variation has been shown to influence survival against different types of predators. My work will focus on the causes of this variation, both within and between populations.
My first moth paper is now out! Check out Proc B to learn about the target-specific chemical defences of the wood tiger moth.
You can also read about the research over at Inside Science.
Winter is finally over in Finland (although you wouldn’t always guess it from the weather) so the bird population in Konnevesi can once again relax and get on with the important things, like having babies.
Last year I posted a rather morose description of our struggles to catch enough birds following two bad breeding seasons. I’m happy to report that we did in fact get a decent season in 2016, in fact midsummer was actually sunny! As a result catching was much easier this winter.
But the joy is somewhat short-lived as this May has been one of the coldest on record. I won’t actually be working with the birds this coming winter (I’m off to warmer climes) but I hope this cold weather hasn’t hit them too hard…
This September I was lucky enough to go to Hamburg for a couple of weeks to run some predation experiments with spiders. The experiments were part of a collaboration with Prof. Susanne Dobler and Prof. Jutta Schneider to test the effects of the wood tiger moth’s defence fluids on model spider predators (in this case Nephila senegalensis and Larinioides sclopetarius). Stay tuned for the results!
