Elmer Lab

Big congrats to James Burgon , awarded "best presentation of the day" at the 15th annual Molluscan Forum, run by the Malacological Society of London.  He presented work from his Masters on revising the gastropod genus Paramelania, which is endemic to Lake Tanganyika.  (umm, next time it'll be the salamanders ... )

Two new Midas cichlid species for the Nicaraguan crater lakes: Recknagel H, Kusche H, Elmer KR, Meyer A (2013) Description of two new species in the Midas cichlid species complex: Amphilophus tolteca and Amphilophus viridis (Perciformes: Cichlidae). Aqua, International Journal of Ichthyology , 19 , 207–224.

Congratulations to Hans! Hans Recknagel, Kathryn R. Elmer, Brice P. Noonan, Achille P. Raselimanana, Axel Meyer, Miguel Vences. 2013. Multi-gene phylogeny of Madagascar’s plated lizards, Zonosaurus and Tracheloptychus (Squamata: Gerrhosauridae) . available on-line early at the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution

Good news -- Kathryn is awarded funding from University of Glasgow's John Robertson Bequest. The support is for developing new protocols for next-generation sequencing, which can be used for phylogenomic analyses across species complexes. And many thanks to Hans for all the project help!

On May 16 2013, Kathryn is invited to give a research seminar in Austria at the  Research Institute for Limnology , Mondsee (University of Innsbruck)

Kathryn speaks to students at Glasgow's Hutcheson Grammar School about, 'what's it like to be a zoologist?' Thanks to all those budding young scientists for their enthusiasm!

Our Bolitoglossa research is out in  BMC Evolutionary Biology , finding that South America's salamanders colonized from Central America ca 20MYA. The exciting thing is that such a pattern long precedes the putative ca 3MYA land bridge connection, or isthmus of Panama, and is consistent with some new and  controversial  research from  STRI suggesting that the land bridge may be much older . These salamanders are another example of cryptic species, with high genetic differentiation between putative "species" in the upper Amazon. This is a picture of a Bolitoglossa cf. peruviana that I caught in the upper Napo region of Ecuador, and which in all likelihood is not B. peruviana and instead a new species. (Descriptions are underway!) Kathryn Elmer , Ron Bonett , David Wake and Steve Lougheed . 2013  BMC Evol Biol. 13: 59

Good work Liam ! Congratulations on being awarded research funding from the Glasgow Natural History Society .

Congrats -- Liam was awarded a Student Grant from the British Herpetological Society for his coming Master's research on molecular phylogenetics and phylogeography of salamanders. Well done!

Good news! Glasgow graduate James Burgon has been awarded IBAHCM's only NERC studentship for the Elmer Lab project "How the salamander got his spots". Congrats James!

yikes, for most of last week Hans was fishing for gravid female whitefish in Loch Lomond. Cold hands but fun work! Finally, at least one of us is getting away from the computer this winter ...

Kathryn Elmer is speaking in Edinburgh on Wednesday 23 January -- "Ecological and genomic parallel evolution in crater lake cichlid fishes"

Hans' linkage map (that is, a linkage map of cichlids, not a linkage map of Hans) is out in G3 ! This double-digest restriction site associated DNA sequencing (ddRADSeq) will prove a *very* important methodology for our population genomics. Good-bye microsatellites, hello SNPs!

We have received a great little "Catalyst" award to do some sequencing with Glasgow Polyomics . The project is a pilot to examine phenotypic plasticity and gene expression in lab-reared freshwater fishes. update 05-03-2013: Here's a photo of Oli and his fabulous tank layout for the charr and whitefish. Now the fry must grow and we must wait ...

Check out my talk today at 1 pm-- right here in Graham Kerr lecture theatre for the IBAHCM seminar series "Parallel evolution of crater lake cichlid fish"

catching up with some old news ... Kathryn was awarded a 4-year Marie Curie Career Integration Gran t! This is for studying adaptive divergence in charr and whitefish, two freshwater fishes that are famous for ecological divergence in sympatry and in parallel .

some of our recent work from Axel's group in Konstanz has been covered by National Geographic . This was on the parallel evolution of thick vs thin lips of Midas cichlids in crater lakes and great lakes in Nicaragua and is mostly based on the findings from two recent papers: Elmer KR, Lehtonen TK, Kautt A, Harrod C, Meyer A (2010) Rapid sympatric ecological differentiation of crater lake cichlid fishes in historic times . BMC Biology , 8 , 60. Manousaki T, Hull P, Kusche H, Machado-Schiaffino G, Franchini P, Harrod C, Elmer KR, Meyer A (2013). P arsing parallel evolution: ecological divergence and differential gene expression in thick-lipped Midas cichlid fishes of Nicaragua . Molecular Ecology , 22 , 650-669.