Jérôme Burkiewicz

Picture of MEME students on the beach

Do you want to do a Masters in Evolutionary Biology? The call for applying to the MEME program is now open! MEME is a fantastic 2-year MSc between four European Universities on all areas of Evolutionary Biology. Apply and study in Sweden/France/the Netherlands/Germany/USA/Switzerland! www.evobio.eu

📢 Prochain séminaire // Next conference

AI tools in scientific writing: Should you? And how?

👨‍🔬 Stephen B. Heard, U New Brunswick
📅 Mercredi, 10 septembre 2025, 13:30
📍 Centre sur la biodiversité, B-104

Si vous êtes à Montréal mercredi, vous devriez venir écouter le séminaire de @stephenbheard.bsky.social sur l'utilisation de l'IA en rédaction scientifique! 🧪

If you are in Montreal on Wednesday, you should definitely come to @stephenbheard.bsky.social's talk on AI in scientific writing! 🧪

📢 Prochain séminaire

👩‍🔬 Silvana Martén Rodriguez, UNAM

🧪 Changing tracks towards the summit: pollination and breeding system shifts along tropical mountain gradients

📅 Mercredi 27 août 2025 à 11h30 à l’IRBV (B-354).

Beyond the Grant–Stebbins model: floral adaptive landscapes and plant speciation AbstractBackground. Floral diversity, a striking feature of angiosperm evolution, provides the impetus and rationale for linking pollinator-driven selectio

Is the Most Effective Pollinator Principle a zombie idea? How do plants adapted to one pollinator shift to another without traversing an adaptive valley? How should we measure fitness in pollinator selection studies? We explore these questions and more in a new review doi.org/10.1093/aob/...

Interested in sex chromosomes evolution and want to wrap up today’s talks on a colorful note? Come see my presentation on guppy sex chromosomes today, July 8th! 🐠

#CSEE2025
⌚16h15, 📍 Lac Memphrémagog

Hey #CSEE2025 interested in flowers, natural selection, urbanization or any combination of the three?
I’m presenting results of my thesis at 11am today in the urban ecology session (Rivière Coaticook)

In the field, phenotypic plasticity masked the genetic differences observed in the common garden.

Urbanization influenced flower morphology through both plastic and genetic changes!

This counter-gradient variation means the environment dampens genetic adaptation—making evolution harder to detect!

Bumblebee size was also positively correlated with the genetic component of sepal size.

This suggests that bumblebee size is a key selective agent acting on Impatiens capensis sepal size

But wait—there’s more!

The difference in bumblebee size between urban and natural sites wasn’t the same in every city.

Interestingly, the genetic component of sepal size paralleled this result, the variation in sepal size following the one in bumblebee size.

We combined field and common garden experiments to study flower evolution in natural and urban habitats, disentangling plastic from genetic responses.

We surveyed pollinators and flower morphology of Impatiens capensis in 16 populations across the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto regions.

Urbanization alters species richness, abundance, and even evolution—especially of pollinators.

Since pollinators form mutualistic interactions with plants, shifts in their diversity, abundance, or traits can drive selection on flower morphology.

🚨 My first first-authored paper is out on bioRxiv!

🌆🏵️ Urbanization changed the pollinator community and flower morphology of Impatiens capensis.

🐝 The size of bumblebees—the main pollinators—correlated with sepal size, driving selection for larger sepals in urban populations.

🧵 More below ⬇️

Je suis heureuse d’annoncer l’obtention d’une bourse postdoctorale du FRQ pour mon projet sur les conséquences de la perte de recombinaison génétique chez les guppys, dans le labo de Judith Mank (UBC)! Je présenterai ces travaux au #SCEE2025 à Sherbrooke cet été – au plaisir de vous y voir!

If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Extreme events induced by climate change alter nectar offer to pollinators in cross pollination-dependent crops - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Extreme events induced by climate change alter nectar offer to pollinators in cross pollination-dependent crops

🌧️🌵 Climate extremes are reshaping the world of pollinators!

A new study reveals that a decrease or excessive increase in water availability can negatively affect the reproductive potential of plant species & pollinators collecting their nectar. 🌍🧪

Learn more: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting news! @wcratcliff.bsky.social and I published an essay last week in @nature.com reviewing the substantial contributions of 'long-term' studies to evolutionary biology
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/n

Within-species floral evolution reveals convergence in adaptive walks during incipient pollinator shift - Nature Communications During evolution, how adaptive walks cross fitness valleys remains unclear. This integrative study on monkeyflowers reveals that convergence in large steps (floral color and gene expression) drives a ...

Really excited to say that my lab's paper on color transitions in Mimulus sect. Erythranthe is out! We found that some traits demonstrate evolutionary convergence in phenotype & genotype, while others are divergent, & that - as Bob Vickery found - bees prefer yellow!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The title of the paper, 'A test of the Grant–Stebbins pollinator-shift model of floral evolution,' published in New Phytologist.

Graphs showing how floral morphology in B. gregaria aligns with pollinator body size and contact probability. The first two graphs show that mean style length increases with pollinator body size (weighted mean pollinator body length and the mean body length of the most important pollinator group). The other two graphs show the probability of contact with floral reproductive parts by ubiquitous pollinators: honeybees contact them more often at short-style sites, while bee flies show no significant difference among sites.

Moir et al. (2025) asked how pollinators drive geographic floral divergence in Brunsvigia gregaria with a generalist pollination system. Style length correlates with the body length of locally important pollinators, highlighting their critical role in floral evolution. #Ecology

bit.ly/4aEqb8u

Assistant Professor in Quantitative Genetics - IRBV is located in the Montreal Botanical Garden, one of the largest in North America. job with Université de Montréal / IRBV | 12835129 Tenure-track Assistant Professor position to develop a research program related to quantitative genetics of plants or plant-associated systems.

JOB ALERT:
Join us @irbv.bsky.social , the Univeristy of Montreal to develop your research program related to quantitative genetics where #plants are the object of study or an integral part of the studied system.

www.nature.com/naturecareer...

New work reveals the impact of anxiety & depression on PhD students.
"Anxiety and depression can have a substantially detrimental impact on graduate students’ experiences [..] and likely also contribute to increased time to degree and student attrition."
nature.com/articles/s41...

We’ve put a lot of work into making Bluesky a healthier social network. This app is designed to give you a choice — in what you want to see, what you don’t want to see, and how you want to interact.

Some tips on how to customize your experience:

Hi Brian, thanks for the list. Can I also be added please ?

The Joly lab at #Evol2024 today…

Jérôme Burkiewicz (@jeromeburkiewicz) is presenting some of his PhD work on the genetic and plastic effects of urbanization in flower chape of the jewelweed.

📌 4:15, room 525AB (Floral Evolution), Sunday 28th

Non-definitive guides on developing a reading habit & generating project ideas Note from Meghan: This is a guest post by my colleague Gina Baucom on a topic that's sure to be of interest to lots of readers! *** I lead a graduate-level professional development seminar* where we r...

Guest blog from me on Dynamic Ecology, a guide for beginning grads on developing a reading habit and project ideas! Super grateful for reposts :)

Opinion: Stagnant investments in training and research compromise Canada’s economic growth Canada invests just 1.55 per cent of gross domestic product in research and development, which pales in comparison to peer countries

Stagnant investments in training and research compromise Canada’s economic growth

Read this new commentary (and see the numbers) written by Professor Marc Johnson, Chair of our Board of Directors, in @theglobeandmail.com:

www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com... #SupportOurScience

Cycle of reproduction of the hybrid C. eos x eos-neogaeus as we now know it, where maternal ploidy dictate whether the progeny reproduces sexually or asexually.

New paper alert! ✨

Mothers dictating how to reproduce? How weird! In a hybrid fish, however, that is the reality!

Check how maternal ploidy governs gonadal development into producing either sexual or asexual oocytes, all that in our new paper linked below!

t.ly/hSUX8

Minnow fish held in hands

Hello everyone! I'm Joëlle, a late PhD (UMontreal, CAN) starting her postdoc next January (UBC, CAN). I work on all things touching reproduction 🐣. My PhD was on the reproduction of weird hybrid fish🐟 (clones and stuff) and my postdoc is on the evolution of sexual chromosomes🧬!
Nice to meet you all!