Elmer Lab

We welcome our new summer interns! Magdalena Butowska has just finished first year and will be working on molecular lab work of fish mtDNAs, morphometrics and plasticity; Robbie Hussein has just finished second year and will be working on analysing whether pregnancy affects the running speed of lizards; Giuditta Magian won a School of Life Sciences Undergraduate Vacation Scholarship after her third year and is busy working on Team Lizard-catching down in the Alps; Tie Caribe just finished fourth year (whoop!) and was awarded an FSBI internship with Colin Adams. He will be doing some of his lab work up in the roof labs; John Smout finished his Masters in Biotech last year, having done a project with us in the field then, and is also busy with Team Lizard this summer before he starts his PhD with MVLS in the autumn.

What is the impact of the 'refuge' or 'ark population' conservation measure on biodiversity? Masters/Honours student Peter Koene along with PhD student Marco Crotti have completed a project on how morphologies and plasticity change in new habitats and after population bottlenecks, studying powan or European whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus) here in Scotland. Full paper is available here "Differential selection pressures result in a rapid divergence of donor and refuge populations of a high conservation value freshwater fish Coregonus lavaretus (L.)" J. Peter Koene, Marco Crotti, Kathryn R Elmer, Colin E Adams Abstract As a conservation measure to protect European whitefish in Scotland, a translocated popu-lation  was  established  in  Loch  Sloy  from  Loch  Lomond  stock  between  1988  and  1990.  Previous  study  has  assumed  that  current  morphological  differences  between  adults  from  the  donor  and  refuge  lakes  have  arisen  through  phen