The Molecular Ecology Prize Committee has announced the 2025 recipient of the award, which recognizes an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to the still-young field of molecular ecology:

The Molecular Ecology Prize Committee is pleased to announce that the 2025 Molecular Ecology Prize has been awarded to Dr. Rosemary G. Gillespie, who is an evolutionary biologist and professor of Environmental Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  Professor Gillespie has profoundly shaped the field of molecular ecology through her pioneering research, visionary leadership, and dedicated mentorship. Her interdisciplinary work bridges evolutionary biology, island biogeography, community ecology, and molecular genetics, addressing fundamental questions about biodiversity and adaptation. She has illuminated key mechanisms of species diversification and ecological community assembly, particularly in arthropods. Her seminal 2004 Science paper on Hawaiian spiders used molecular phylogenetics to demonstrate that adaptive radiation can structure ecological communities through in situ diversification—an influential contribution that now stands as a cornerstone of community and evolutionary ecology. Through decades of work in the Hawaiian archipelago, Dr. Gillespie’s research has set a benchmark for applying molecular tools to unravel complex ecological and evolutionary processes. Beyond her scholarship, she has been a dedicated leader and advocate for the molecular ecology community, notably through her long-standing editorial service to the journal Molecular Ecology.

Professor  Gillespie  joins the previous winners of the Molecular Ecology Prize: Godfrey Hewitt, John Avise, Pierre Taberlet, Harry Smith, Terry Burke, Josephine Pemberton, Deborah Charlesworth, Craig Moritz, Laurent Excoffier, Johanna Schmitt, Fred Allendorf, Louis Bernatchez, Nancy Moran, Robin Waples, Scott Edwards, Victoria Sork, Fuwen Wei, Kerstin Johannessen, Uma Ramakrishnan, and Michael Whitlock.

The 2025 Harry Smith Prize, which recognizes the best paper published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources in the previous year by an early career scholar, has been awarded to Óscar Romero-Báez, a doctoral student at the Institute of Ecology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and his co-authors for their paper “Environmental and anthropogenic factors mediating the functional connectivity of the mesquite lizard along the eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic”.

The Harry Smith Prize Committee, which included previous Harry Smith Prize winners or runners-up Antonino Malacrinò, Angel Rivera-Colon, and Jana Wold, wrote in their decision announcement:

Romero-Báez et al. investigated how human-altered landscapes affect the functional connectivity of a widely distributed lizard, Sceloporus grammicus, in Mexico’s eastern Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Using genomic data and landscape analysis, the study found significant genetic differentiation across the region but also evidence of gene flow over long distances, despite the species’ low mobility. Key environmental factors influencing connectivity included air and substrate temperature, humidity, and aspect. Agricultural areas surprisingly supported connectivity, while forest cover and roads had mixed effects depending on scale. More broadly, the authors’ rigorous use of gravity models, spatial statistics, and ecological data sets a new standard for landscape genetics in reptiles, and offers important insights for biodiversity conservation in human-modified landscapes.

The winning article is available Open Access at the Molecular Ecology website.

Genotype-environment association is one of the most fundamental phenomena of landscape genomics. A species’ adaptation to its environment should mean that populations of the same species in different environments will evolve different frequencies of genetic variants that support adaptation to those different environments. So in principle, we should be able to find those locally adaptive genetic variants by “scanning” through many places in the genome to find the ones where individuals from different environments carry different variants.

There’s a catch, of course. Actually several. Isolation-by-distance and founder effects can mean that populations evolve genetic differences just as a consequence of being in different places. Even when you control for those effects, so-called genotype-environment association (GEA) is just that — an association. You can’t know for sure that a genetic locus showing a pattern of GEA has a functional relationship to traits that facilitate adaptation without independent data showing that function. A recent preprint reports a project in which plant geneticists did just that, performing experimental validation on GEA candidate loci, and they found a lot of those candidate loci don’t seem to hold up.

To demonstrate this, Yuxin Luo and coauthors in Jesse Lasky’s lab at Penn State University started by assembling a list of GEA candidates found in three prior studies of Arabidopsis thaliana. Arabidopsis is the lab rat of plants, a little weedy member of the mustard family that’s quick to grow in a greenhouse or a climate-controlled growth chamber, with a small diploid genome that has been extensively studied and annotated. It’s become something of a “field model” organism as multiple teams have taken insights and resources from lab and greenhouse experiments to studies of wild Arabidopsis populations.

Wild Arabidopsis populations are distributed from the Mediterranean to Siberia, and many studies have described local adaptation to that wide range of environmental variation. The three studies selected by Luo et al. used different statistical methods to test single nucleotide polymorphisms for associations with climate variation — mostly precipitation variation, but also temperature. We’d expect SNPs with such associations to lie in genes that shape drought stress tolerance or avoidance — by, for instance, flowering before the onset of a hot, dry summer — and freezing resistance. The definitive evidence for those roles would be an experiment showing that plants carrying different variants of a gene near a climate-associated SNP have different growth or reproductive success depending on the environment they experience — a genotype-by-environment interaction.

From the climate-associated SNPs identified in the three prior studies, Luo et al. picked 42 genes to test. They tested those loci for genotype-by-environment interactions by drawing on the Salk collection, a library of Arabidopsis lines derived from a single inbred ancestor, in which individual genes have been mutated into non-functionality by treatment with bacterial transfer-DNA. These “knockout lines” should be genetically identical to each other except for the one mutation unique to each line, so differences in how plants grown from each line respond to an experimental environment are due to each plant line’s mutated gene. That’s the kind of powerful experimental genetic resource you get to use, when you work with Arabidopsis.

Luo et al. put that resource to use by growing mutant lines carrying each of their GEA candidate loci with either sufficient water, or under drought-stress conditions. To the extent that GEA results reflect local adaptation to natural variation in water availability, plants with mutant variants at the GEA candidate loci should have different fitness than plants from the un-mutated ancestral line — and the magnitude or even direction of those differences should change in the drought-stress treatment, a genotype-by-environment interaction.

For the most part, this is not what they found. In the drought-stress treatment, all of the plant genotypes had reduced fitness, measured as aboveground biomass, flowering time, flower and fruit production, or fruit size – but these reductions occurred in similar ways for plants carrying mutations at most of the GEA candidate loci. Only two loci showed genotype-by-environment interactions in fitness measures.

On the one hand, that’s a lot of GEA candidates that don’t seem to pan out. However, as the authors point out, it may be that some candidate loci that don’t show significant genotype-by-environment interactions in their experiment still have functional effects that aren’t captured by their experimental setup. The drought treatment may not reflect natural environmental variation that drives local adaptation in real populations.

And, second, the simplicity that makes the Salk library of mutations so useful for experimentation is itself a limitation, in a sense. In natural populations, variants at candidate loci may be adapted in the context of variation elsewhere in the genome. The Salk lines are engineered to carry individual mutations on otherwise identical “genetic backgrounds”, to isolate the effects of the mutations. So if a GEA candidate has an effect that varies across genetic backgrounds, it might not show the expected interaction with environment in the one background shared by the Salk lines. All of which is to say, traits created by multiple loci are challenging to work with!

So maybe unambiguous experimental validation for two out of 42 GEA candidates is actually pretty good, all things considered. Luo et al. also call out an observation that may be useful for those of us thinking about followup from an initial GEA “scan” — both of their validated loci were the top-ranked candidates, showing the strongest GEA signal, of all loci tested in their respective source studies. They suggest identifying candidates by rank — like taking the top 1%, or 0.01% of tested loci — may give better results for follow-up work than selecting them based on an a priori threshold of statistical significance — like taking all loci with GEA at p < 0.05. That’s a nice specific recommendation for future studies in species where it’s not so straightforward to do this kind of follow-up validation.

References

Joost S, A Bonin, MW Bruford, L Després, C Conord, G Erhardt, and P Taberlet. 2007. A spatial analysis method (SAM) to detect candidate loci for selection: towards a landscape genomics approach to adaptation. Molecular Ecology. 16(18):3955-69. doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03442.x

Luo Y, C Lorts, E Lawrence-Paul, and J Lasky. 2025. Experimental validation of genome-environment associations in Arabidopsis. biorXiv. doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.08.631904

O’Malley RC, Barragan CC, Ecker JR. A user’s guide to the Arabidopsis T-DNA insertion mutant collections. Methods Mol Biol. 2015;1284:323-42. doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2444-8_16; PMID 25757780

Here’s a new one for my publications list: the Op-Ed pages of my hometown newspaper. I’ve spent the last weeks calling my congressional reps, and hassling other people to do the same, over the Trump administration’s vandalism of research funding (alongside its vandalism of just about every other function of the federal government), but it’s hardly felt like enough. One new option presented when I happened across Science Homecoming, a project to recruit scientists to speak out in support of federal research agencies in the newspapers of towns where they grew up. As Science Homecoming points out, local newspapers continue to have a huge audience across the country, and that’s an opportunity to reach people where they live, with stories that show how the current crisis impacts their local communities.

So I looked up the opinion section editor at LNP/LancasterOnline, the modern incarnation of the paper my parents have subscribed to since I was old enough to read it, which serves central Pennsylvania. I emailed her a pitch that I’d put together following Science Homecoming’s suggestions, and she wrote back to ask for a full column almost immediately. (The topic was already very much on the editorial staff’s radar.) A bit more than a week later, my column is online and in print, alongside a parallel piece from two geoscientists with local roots, on the front page of the Sunday Perspectives section. 

I wrote it as a sort of thumbnail science memoir, recalling how I first got excited about studying the natural world thanks to a high school biology teacher who took the class outside to learn the names of common wildflowers. Federal research funding made it possible for me to follow that dream, and today’s budding botanists won’t have the same opportunities I did, if the Trump administration’s policies stand:

My journey from Manheim to the Mojave, inspired by Mr. Longenecker’s wildflower walks, was really made possible by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Grants from that federal agency supported research experiences I had as an undergraduate student, as well as the work I did to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Idaho, and then postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota before I ended up at California State University Northridge. The biggest single source of support for my own lab has been a National Science Foundation grant, and my research plans for the next five years and beyond are laid out in project proposals I’ve been working to submit.

Now, however, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — the bigger federal agency that funds biomedical research — are under unprecedented threat from funding freezes and cuts imposed by the Trump administration.

I’ll send you to LancasterOnline to read the whole thing. And, fellow scientists and technical professionals, let me encourage you to take up the Science Homecoming banner — it’s one more way to get the word out about everything that’s at stake right now.

The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded Molecular Ecology and served as both Chief and Managing Editor during the journal’s critical early years. He continued as the journal’s Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world’s foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, where he determined how plants respond to shading, leading to concepts such as “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance,” which are fundamental to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. More broadly his research provided an early example of how molecular data could inform ecology, and in 2008 he was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize that recognized both his scientific and editorial contributions to the field.

Please send a PDF of the paper you are nominating, with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) directly to molecol.social@gmail.com by Friday 25 April 2025. Self-nominations are encouraged.

We are soliciting nominations for the annual Molecular Ecology Prize.

The field of molecular ecology is young and inherently interdisciplinary. As a consequence, research in molecular ecology is not currently represented by a single scientific society, so there is no body that actively promotes the discipline or recognizes its pioneers. The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology therefore created the Molecular Ecology Prize in order to fill this void, and recognize significant contributions to this area of research. The prize selection committee is independent of the journal and its editorial board.

The prize will go to an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to Molecular Ecology. These contributions would mostly be scientific, but the door is open for other kinds of contributions that were crucial to the development of the field.  The previous winners are: Godfrey Hewitt, John Avise, Pierre Taberlet, Harry Smith, Terry Burke, Josephine Pemberton, Deborah Charlesworth, Craig Moritz, Laurent Excoffier, Johanna Schmitt, Fred Allendorf, Louis Bernatchez, Nancy Moran, Robin Waples, Scott Edwards, Victoria Sork, Fuwen Wei, Kerstin Johannesson, Uma Ramakrishnan, and Mike Whitlock.

Please send your nomination with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) and the candidate’s CV directly to Kay Hodgins (kathryn.hodgins@monash.edu) by Friday, April 11, 2025.  Organized campaigns to submit multiple nominations for the same person are not necessary and can be counterproductive. Also, note that nominations from previous years do not roll over. Thus, previous submissions should be re-submitted with an updated supporting statement and CV.

With thanks on behalf of the Molecular Ecology Prize Selection Committee.

In my first year of graduate school at the University of Idaho, I joined a bunch of my colleagues in the audience of a debate staged between an evolutionary biologist and a creationist. I remember almost nothing of the debate’s specifics. The creationist held up largely by talking past his opponent, and the audience discussion after featured howlers like the suggestion that the almighty intelligent designer had, as an indication of his power, arranged the sun and the moon so they appear to be the same size as viewed from Earth. (They demonstrably do not.) None of it felt particularly threatening. My gang of biologists and biologists-in-training went for drinks afterward at one of the less-fratty bars near campus, in a more or less uniform mood of self-assurance.

Well.

That creationist was on the faculty of a little religious college that had its campus in downtown Moscow, Idaho, within a block of the bar where we were took our after-debate party. The college is one ministry of a church founded in Moscow by the creationist’s brother, in pursuit of an effort to “reconstruct” the U.S. into his vision of theocracy, modeled on the slaveholding Confederate South. That effort is now a nationwide network of home-schoolers, religious schools, and churches — including a congregation that counts among its members the current nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

So much for that self-assurance.

I started my career in evolutionary biology at what was, in retrospect, a brief moment of triumphalism for the field. In my first semester of grad school, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial concluded that “intelligent design” — the claim that complex biological molecules are proof of an intelligent creator — was not allowable in a public school’s science curriculum, because it was ultimately a religious, not scientific, position. The first Evolution meetings I attended included a panel discussion with the legal team that won Kitzmiller; and within that same year the U of I hosted a seminar by the director of the National Center for Science Education, who had helped plan the Kitzmiller strategy.

The sense coming out of Kitzmiller was that facts had won decisively. The plaintiffs’ counsel piled up research papers in front of a pro-ID witness to make the point that he was rejecting scientific consensus. They also discovered incomplete find-and-replace errors that revealed how an overtly religious creationist textbook had been sanitized into an ID-centric version.

And yet, coming up on two decades later, the victory of factual truth has proven to have all the structural integrity of a wax teakettle. The incoming U.S. presidential administration is aligned with a conservative movement that has continued to push the legal limits on introducing sectarian beliefs into public education — with support from the highest court in the nation — and has clear plans to undermine the independence of public schoolteachers across every subject, including science. It also reflects what is in retrospect a remarkable alignment of denialist campaigns since the days of Kitzmiller — uniting and empowering activists against action to limit climate change, against vaccination, against evidence-based gender-affirming treatment and reproductive care, and against efforts to correct racial and gender inequities.

Looking over the omni-denialism of our new government, it is hardly surprising that it is led by a man who recognizably uses creationist debating tactics. On all of these topics, evidence-based positions are lost in a mainstream media that has retreated from adjudicating what is true or false, and swamped in discussions on social media platforms incapable of or uninterested in moderating against denialism. “Teach the controversy” has long been Creationists’ reasonable-sounding request to have their religious beliefs treated as a viable alternative to the history of the living world we’ve pieced together with the tools of science. We have not yet been forced to teach the controversy, for the most part, but outside science classrooms we now live the controversy, surrounded by public discourse in which false ideas never get rejected, so long as they have a sufficiently powerful constituency.

Evidence-based reasoning advances by rejecting what is false. How can scientists do our jobs, much less engage with a broader public, in a society that seems to be incapable of collectively rejecting what is false?

I’m not going to pretend I have any definitive answer. However, what currently gives me hope is that, first, science has absolutely faced similar circumstances in other times and places, and advanced and informed society nonetheless. (That “nonetheless” covers a lot of hardship born by individual people, however!) Second, scientists still have the public’s trust even as we live the controversy — 76% of Americans express “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, and that broad pattern holds up internationally, with the U.S. showing greater trust in scientists than the global mean. How do we show ourselves worthy of that trust, and draw on it to advocate for evidence, even while we’re living in the controversy?

Here are my ideas, spiraling outward from the very personal (what should you do to personally set yourself up to break through the noise with your expertise) to the broader institutional and then sort of cycling back around to what you, personally, need. This isn’t and can’t be comprehensive or prescriptive, but it’s what feels workable to me, at this moment. Maybe it’ll help you, too:

Build a public profile you control. If you want to have a public voice, you probably do need to engage on currently active social media platforms — but only to the extent that you can usefully communicate on them, and you should first and foremost have a public presence that isn’t dependent on a single platform or company. Build a website you can update with your personal and professional news — here’s a terrific new guide to getting that off the ground quickly, relatively cheaply, and relatively simply — and engage on social platforms by sharing from that personal home base.

Focus on what you know and how you know it. A caveat to the widespread public trust in scientists is the denialist tactic of “equal and opposite PhDs” — parrying the testimony of genuine experts with rebuttal from anyone with an advanced degree, so the debate becomes “scientists disagree” even if informed experts don’t, in fact, disagree. The solution to this is, I think, to identify your core expertise — the topic on which you can swiftly explain the evidence and reasoning underlying expert consensus — and stick to it. Readers of this blog will have some obvious candidates for topics: biodiversity loss, climate change impacts, our understanding of human diversity — and good old evolution itself.

Follow and boost a network of real individual people. Part of focusing on what you know is pointing to others who know other topics better, when those topics arise. Trust is built by honesty about our own limitations. Social media has encouraged the growth of omniexperts, people with public profiles building huge followings by having an opinion on whatever topic is currently trending — and inevitably having uninformed opinions on at least some of those topics. For most of us, other people’s expertise will be salient more often than our own. Know what you know, and know who knows other things better. And, by the same token that you should build a personal online presence independent of any one social network, know where to find these folks outside centralized social platforms. Then you can refer to them — link to them, boost their posts, cite their work — when their expertise is salient.

Find, support, and help build trustworthy institutions. Further outward from the circle of people you can follow, boost, and cite directly are larger institutions that need support, service, and engagement, and which offer you support in return. Scholarly societies are the core of this for scientists — join relevant ones if you haven’t already, and pick one or two to engage at a deeper level. I am only just dipping my toe into service for the American Society of Naturalists, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, and it’s already enriched my experience with the society. Read your societies’ journals, send your papers to them, and take on reviewing service when asked. Beyond the core institutional network of your field are journalistic outlets, which you can judge by their track record, and support with subscriptions — for me the big ones are now my local NPR affiliates and ProPublica, as well as more topic-specific options like Scientific American, Bolts, and Assigned Media.

And then also, find yourself at least one institution that is not primarily about work or information, but just about connecting with other people in person. This can be a religious congregation, if that’s your inclination, but really anything that fits the bill of “regular organized in-person activities.” For me that’s the Los Angeles Frontrunners, who literally give me something to do on a Sunday morning — a group run, then brunch — as well as friends to join on weekend getaways, the occasional potluck, and community service opportunities including fundraising to help our city cope with the catastrophic wildfires that have been burning here for the last two weeks.

Reading through those thoughts as I revise, I realize the unifying thread here is build ties to people, not platforms. Those ties may be online, in many cases, and mediated through publications and larger organizations — but they can be organized to survive the loss of any one app or method of contact. In the last four years we’ve seen how tenuous social media is as a means for staying in touch and contributing to the public conversation, and it seems likely many of the big platforms will only become more fully converted to living the controversy that lets denialism thrive.

Creationists and their denialist allies have spent decades organizing their own network of institutions and relationships to get them to this triumphalist point. To hold our ground as scientists, we’ve got to remember that we can do the same.

Driving up to Monterey from southern California is lovely enough to make me almost enjoy driving. Highway 1, just two lanes of traffic right at the edge of the continent, pays for its clifftop views of the Pacific with frequent closure for landslides. But even the more inland route of the US-101 highway takes in sweeping ocean views from Ventura to Pismo Beach, interspersed with and then replaced by rolling hills of oak savannah. Even when those give way to pasture and a distressingly large roadside oil field, there’s still the jumbled rocky towers of Pinnacles National Park beckoning (if not visible) from the exit at Soledad — and then you cut of the highway and wind through green farmland and increasingly expensive-looking housing tracts and golf courses until you arrive in the town where John Steinbeck partied with bums and dockworkers and a cantankerous marine biologist most of a century ago, looking out over rocky coast to the wide ocean.

That drive is something of a seasonal ritual for me, thanks to the American Society of Naturalists’ biennial meeting. ASN is perpetually trying to find an alternate location, ideally east of the Mississippi, to host their standalone scientific conference in rotation. But so far no one has come up with a better spot than the Asilomar conference center. It’s a former YWCA campground, with gorgeous Arts and Crafts halls surrounded by comfortable hotel-style lodging, built among dunes studded with Monterey pines and within earshot of the beach. Even in January it’s a great place to “go be biologists” between scientific talks, as ASN President Dan Bolnick exhorted everyone in his welcome address the first night. Deer wander through the conference grounds fearlessly, and warblers flit through the trees. Jogging up the beach trail into town I saw harbor seals, sea lions, and a sea otter; one morning I got out early with my camera and snapped photos of shorebirds foraging in the wet sand at the tide line.

The actual scientific content of the conference was up to the high standard I’ve come to expect — cutting-edge ecology and evolutionary biology, delivered in afternoon symposia of invited half-hour talks that everyone attends, and morning concurrent sessions of submitted talks with a comparatively generous 20-minute time limit.

Joan Roughgarden delivered the first evening’s plenary talk, walking us through her recent work translating population genetic theory to the coevolution of hosts and horizontally transmitted microbial symbionts — the holobiont. (The math leaves her somewhat skeptical that the holobiont functions as a coherent evolutionary entity.)

The first symposium, “Unlocking the power of genetic time series data to understand microevolutionary and ecological dynamics” featured some great examples of genetic data collected across multiple timepoints. Mark Bitter presented results from an ongoing experiment tracking seasonal adaptation cycles in Drosophila — in an array of replicate outdoor cages full of flies. Meaghan Clark described multi-generation pedigree data for estimating inbreeding in populations of Massasauga rattlesnakes. And Isaac Overcast and the symposium organizer, Brendan Reid, described a machine-learning analysis pipeline to model phylogeographic histories — which very recently helped identify shared postglacial expansions by nine eastern North American snake species.

The second symposium I confess, I can’t evaluate objectively, since I organized it. “Not ‘when’ but ‘how’ — towards a process-centered view of species evolving together” was the symposium version of my post from last year digging into how we understand what it means for interacting species to “coevolve”. (There is also now a preprint version!) In that spirit, I called in folks working on the evolution and ecology of species interactions from the widest possible array of perspectives:

• Chris Smith gave a definitive review of the current state of knowledge about yucca-yucca moth interactions;
• Amanda Hewes talked about convergent evolution in nectar-feeding birds;
• Georgia Drew showed us experimental coevolution in a microbial protection mutualism with Caenorhabditis elegans;
• Chris Carlson gave us theory of migration and local maladaptation in a geographic mosaic;
• Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt talked about her work reconstructing plant-insect interactions from the fossil record; and
• Colin Carlson presented new results about the network structure of hosts and associates like mutualistic or parasitic symbionts

The third and final symposium had less molecular genetic data than anything I’ve discussed up to this point, but included some very cool results. “It’s about time: Insights from the integration of age and time into ecological and evolutionary analysis” opened with Kjetil Voje explaining that by estimating additive genetic variation from phenotypic variation, it’s possible to infer genetic variation of fossilized populations — and then relate that genetic variation to actual evolutionary change in well-resolved fossil records. Lee Hsiang Liow followed that up with analysis of fitness functions inferred from fecundity and competitive outcomes recorded in bryozoan fossils. Those two talks pretty well collapsed whatever distinctions I might have made between “micro-” and “macroevolution”.

I also caught a bunch of good contributed talks outside the symposia. Maria Rebolleda-Gomez gave a great brief on her lab’s work towards predicting the evolution of microbial communities — which she analogizes to the microbe cultivation necessary for cheesemaking. David Hembry presented patterns of host plant association in a community of undescribed brood-pollinating Epicephala moths, with moth-host plant interaction networks inferred based on the moths’ phylogenetic differentiation. Jay Gallagher described a fascinating pattern of increasing morphological novelty in Hawai’ian cricket populations attacked by parasitoid flies that track their mating songs — which he described as evolution “throwing spaghetti at the wall” to find new adaptive forms. And Heather Kenny-Duddela demonstrated that plumage traits predict extra-pair mating success in female barn swallows as well as in males — though the plumage-mating relationships differ between sexes.

This was my fourth Asilomar conference, and very possibly the best one I’ve been to. Certainly getting to invite my own slate of symposium speakers contributed to that, but I think also everyone was in good spirits. The “vibe” was good, as one person said to me en route to checkout on the last day. The social events were fun and collegial, and I had some great conversations in the dining hall — particularly facilitated by the mentoring pairings set up by ASN’s Diversity Committee. The smaller size of these meetings means I actually talk to people multiple times over the conference, and between that, the communal dining, and the Asilomar architecture, it really has the feeling that we’re all at “science camp”.

Driving south after a morning on the beach with the sanderlings and a final breakfast in the dining hall, I was already looking forward to returning — to many of the same colleagues and topics, if not the same locale — two years from now.

The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post.

One minor personal accomplishment I scored this year is that it’s the first year since I started tracking, fully a decade ago, in which I’ve gotten through more than 20 purely extracurricular books. It’s not been easy, between the volume of text I work through as an academic and the propensity of social media to keep me focused on works that are, at most, long-form essays and articles. Still, one in particular thing cracked the code this year, and that was letting myself use audiobooks.

Swapping audiobooks in for podcasts on my running workouts opened up hours of book time every week, from narrative fiction to more science-adjacent stuff. It also turned out to come in handy for fieldwork trips, and I spent a lot of time driving out to the desert with a car-ful of students to survey Joshua tree populations. I signed up for a one-book-a-month membership at Libro.fm, where purchases benefit an independent bookstore of my choice — and which partners with the similarly bookseller-supporting Bookshop.org, where The Molecular Ecologist is an affiliate — and that’s proven to be about right for my consumption rate.

Adding more books to my media rotation has been good for my blood pressure in another year of frequently sad and frustrating and outright frightening news, and it’s put me in touch with some great science communicators. Here are some science books (and one that is at best science-adjacent) that I read or listened to this year, and which are, I think, each well worth your time — and maybe helpful if you’re still filling in the cracks of a holiday gift-giving list.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I am probably the last in a long, long line of plant- and science- and plant-science-focused people to recommend this book, but it really is that good. It’s a memoir told through the lens of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s relationship to plants, both as a botanist trained in mainstream western science and an Indigenous American, in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her perspective is invaluable and frequently eye-opening, and she reads the audiobook herself, beautifully. — Find it on Bookshop.

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller. Anyone who’s taught more than a bit of phylogenetics knows the punchline to this book — that fish are paraphyletic to the rest of the vertebrates, which means either that we are all fish, or “fish” are actually an arbitrary collection of smaller clades — but that is much less important in the scheme of the book than you might expect. Rather, it’s a deep dive into the life story of the vertebrate taxonomist David Starr Jordan, which is checkered at best, interleaved with the author’s own history with science and belief. Miller is a Public Radio veteran, formerly a producer on RadioLab, and her reading of the audiobook has the voice and feel of a great history of science podcast series. — Find it on Bookshop.

Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening by Douglas Brinkley. This is magisterial, old-school history of the modern U.S. environmental movement, its legal victories under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the seeds of opposition in the Nixon administration that now threaten it all. Brinkley traces the personal relationships of these presidents to nature and the environmental movement, but in particular shows how Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sits in the movement and the political maneuvering. Carson’s scientific writing provided a focal point, and a call to action, for so much of the work that has given us a cleaner, — Find it on Bookshop.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. I bought a copy of this for my lawyer boyfriend last year, and this year played it while driving students through the desert. It’s less focused on legalities, as it turns out, than on the ways humans have tried and often failed to navigate conflicts with wildlife. There’s a lot of descriptions of frequently gruesome wildlife-control methods, and how they inevitably fail. (As just one example: lacing fields with poison grain to kill birds that eat the harvest … and which are swiftly replaced by a new flock.) But there are also plenty of interviews with people working to resolve those conflicts, and figure out how we can share space with the rest of the animal kingdom. — Find it on Bookshop.

How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. This is, it turns out, a good year to contemplate what it means to live a good life, in the sense of both personal satisfaction and moral integrity. Schur, the writer and producer behind several of my favorite cozy-workplace sitcoms, may not seem an obvious writer to address this, but when I tell you that one of those sitcoms is The Good Place, it should make sense. That show’s frequently hilarious exploration of moral philosophy drew on a pretty solid depth of actual philosophy, including expert input. How to be Perfect is that background research in book form, and the audiobook has cast members from the show dropping in to read passages from Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant and the like. This one occupied some field-trip driving time, too, and inspired some legitimately good conversation. — Find it on Bookshop.

We are pleased to announce the inaugural workshop for Molecular Ecology at the Plant & Animal Genomics (PAG) conference. The field of Molecular Ecology has been revolutionized by advances in genomics and computational biology that have enabled us to test hypotheses that were previously unanswerable. Topics that may be addressed in the workshop include the following: ecological genomics, ecological interactions, molecular adaptation, environmental nucleic acids, behavioural genomics, population and conservation genomics, epigenomics, and speciation and hybridization.

Email your abstract by November 12, 2024 to Loren Rieseberg/Shawn Narum to be considered for an oral presentation (loren.rieseberg@botany.ubc.ca; shawnn@uidaho.edu)

This initial workshop will include four invited speakers plus presentations from contributed speakers. Contributed oral presentations will be selected from abstracts submitted to the workshop by November 12, 2024. This workshop aims to bring together researchers, students, and practitioners in the field to explore how recent advances in genomics and molecular biology can be integrated with theory, concepts, and approaches of organismal biology.

Join us January 14, 2025 (10:30 AM-12:40 PM) in San Diego, CA!

For questions regarding abstracts, please contact Loren Rieseberg (loren.rieseberg@botany.ubc.ca) or Shawn Narum (shawnn@uidaho.edu).