Big congratulations to Ginger on her first first-author paper! An exciting science milestone and a testament to her hard work. Read about the work in the Journal of Applied Entomology 

New work out in the journal Biological Conservation! Surprisingly, we found that many (though not all!) managed populations show signals of genetic adaptation, comparable to those seen in the wild. Our work suggests that conservation programs are dynamic systems where adaptive genetic change can occur over contemporary timescales. 

The team attended CSEE in Sherbrooke Quebec! We organized a symposium of phenology across a variety of landscapes and presented work on shrike, burrowing owls, and gray ratsnakes! 

We had a shrike themed lab meeting today with visitors! Alisa Solecki (Queen's University) gave an overview of her research that ranged from measuring migratory restlessness in eastern loggerhead shrike to identifying candidate genes underlying migratory behaviour. Dr. Luzuriaga Aveiga (Toronto Zoo) gave a talk on, "Fitness surface analysis of selection acting on breeding phenology across wild and managed populations of eastern loggerhead shrike". Helmi Hess (Wildlife Preservation Canada) came to learn and help us ground the work in an ecological context! 

An article by Joshua Rapp Learn on our recent publication on the changes in eastern loggerhead shrike morphology is published on the the The Wildlife Society website!

Dr. Laura Graham visited us this week to help train Ginger on a variety of fecal endocrine assay techniques. It was a lovely visit and Dr. Graham imparted a bit of wisdom from her career as a scientist in a presentation entitled, "From the African Lion Safari to Bears in the Woods: Applying physiology research to animal management."

Janel comes back from the Rhino Keeper Workshop in Omaha where she presented alongside Leon Krause on "Seeing through the Gray: Using Infrared Thermography to Track Estrus in the Greater One-Horned Rhino". Hana and Drew return from the Ontario Biodiversity Summit in Peterborough where Hana presented her poster on "Assessing relatedness, genetic diversity and inbreeding in the Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake conservation breeding program". Congratulations to all for networking and presenting your science!

New review article out in Molecular Ecology today! We outline how fitness surfaces, a framework in genetics and evolutionary biology, might help improve species conservation programs! We think many programs may already collect the information needed to conduct some of these analyses. So, in the paper, we outline steps a program could take to start using fitness surfaces. Stay tuned for some implementations soon! Link to the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.17798

Ginger successfully defended her Master's thesis entitled "Assessing species-specific reproductive variation to inform assisted reproductive technologies for Canadian snakes" on April 15th. She was co-supervised by Dr. Steve Lougheed and Dr. Amy Chabot at Queen's University. Congratulations, Ginger!