Angel G. Rivera-Colón

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Are you a grad student attending #Evol2026? Submit your talk for the SSE Hamilton Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation! Finalists will present their talks during the virtual portion of the meeting. Apply during registration. Deadline April 15! shorturl.at/qDIP4 @evolmtg.bsky.social

Water off a manakin’s back: How sexual and natural selection shape plumage coloration in manakins Plumage coloration mechanisms shed light on introgression patterns.

New story on the Avian Hybrids blog!

Water off a manakin’s back: How sexual and natural selection shape plumage coloration in manakins
avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2025/12/10/w...

Based on the Science Advances paper by Haw Chuan Lim et al. | #ornithology

Today in robots.

github.com/matplotlib/m...

crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-we...

Estimating Organism Abundance Using Within‐Sample Haplotype Frequencies of eDNA Data Environmental DNA (eDNA) provides powerful insights into species presence and community composition but remains limited in its capacity to infer species abundance or population structure. Here, we sh...

🧬 My haplotype paper is out!

We show that deviations between within-sample and population-level haplotype frequencies can be used to estimate how many individuals contributed to an eDNA sample.

No tissue references needed, just metabarcoding data and some population genetics.

#eDNA #PopGen

Charles Darwin Quote I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.

Don’t forget the barnacles! www.azquotes.com/quote/1095192

The missing data problem in population genomics and statistical methods to address them The “Missing Data” problem is prevalent across all statistical inference, owing to the “absence of some part of a familiar data structure” (Efron 1994). Po

I wrote a short op-ed in @genetics-gsa.bsky.social G3 this month’s issue on missing data problems in population genomics that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years. Lemme know your thoughts! Comments/suggestions/ideas welcome! doi.org/10.1093/g3jo...

My sculpture of an acorn barnacle—a crustacean!—in steel, bronze, and sterling silver, sitting on a white background. My hand touches the steel barnacle shell and provides scale (barnacle is just a bit smaller than my hand). The barnacle’s filter feeding legs (cirri) are spread dramatically wide.

Merry #Crustmas to all who celebrate! Hoping you are firmly attached to people you love, are able to scoop up large amounts of food, and can hide in an impervious shell when the social situation requires it ❤️

A colorful legacy of hybridization in wood-warblers includes frequent sharing of carotenoid genes among species and genera Introgression between species can shape evolutionary trajectories in important ways. This study of the entire family of the colorful wood-warblers (Parulidae) uses whole-genome sequencing to reveal fr...

New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501

Barnacles the size of a small human fist piled into a museum jar

Big ol’ jar of the whale #barnacle Coronula diadema collected from a humpback whale that stranded in Massachusetts in 2016. Our museum has the whale skeleton as well! #crustmas

I'm recruiting a Ph.D. student for Fall 2026.

Interested in comparative studies and trait evolution in fishes?

Send me an email with a CV and research interests. Please take a look at my website (jcorush.github.io ) for more information about my research.

#hybridization #minnows #mudskippers

Putting on my hat as @asn-amnat.bsky.social ASN President for a minute for a string of announcements, please share widely!!!

1. Student research awards are open for applications, to fund research expenses for 10 graduate students ($2000 each)
nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Early Career Scientist Awards 2026 Application to the UW-Madison Evolution Seminar Series - Early Career Scientist Awards.

Wisconsin Evolution is accepting applications for our Seminar Series' Early Career Scientist Award. Come share your evolution research and visit UW-Madison's evolution community. Open to grad students and postdocs (<5 yrs post PhD) from outside UW-Madison.

Apply by Dec 15th here: shorturl.at/4a4O6

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

that panel from Watchmen

some years, Circulatory System Walking Through the Kitchen Day just completely sneaks up on you

📣📣📣 CONSERVATION GENETICS WORKSHOP -
Few more spaces left!

ConGen Population Genomic Data Analysis Course
🧬💻💡
University of Pretoria, South Africa 🌍
7-14 December + field trip to Kruger NP!
🦁🐃🐘🐆🦏

More info & registration here: www.umt.edu/congen/africa/

GBE | Hemoglobin-Gene Cluster Deletions in Antarctic White-Blooded Icefishes Facilitated by Transposable Elements Analyzing numerous genome assemblies of notothenioid fishes, Desvignes et al. demonstrated that in Antarctic white-blooded icefishes, the only vertebrates living without hemoglobin, the two hemoglobin gene clusters were lost independently from one another by different genomic mechanisms, although both mechanisms incriminate transposable and repeat-like elements.

@notothentoma.bsky.social @arcolon14.bsky.social & @jpostlethwait.bsky.social show how Antarctic white-blooded icefishes, the only vertebrates without hemoglobin, independently lost hemoglobin cluster genes, driven by TEs and repeats.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf184

#genome #evolution #TEsky

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

Reference genome bias in light of species-specific chromosomal reorganization and translocations - Genome Biology Background Whole-genome sequencing efforts, have during the past decade, unveiled the central role of genomic rearrangements—such as chromosomal inversions—in evolutionary processes, including local a...

📌 New publication out:

Reference genome bias in light of species-specific chromosomal reorganization and translocations

TL;DR - We show that the choice of reference genome biases the detection of structural variants and popgen stats. Navigate carefully - 🛳️ 😬

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Do you know anyone with an interest in pursuing a PhD studying the genetics, development, and evolution of skeletal morphology and life history? If so please encourage them to apply to work with me through any of the University of Illinois' EEB or PEEC programs. 1/4 🧪🦷🦴🐭🐒

Top left: Results of genome-wide association study (GWAS) for sex in E. caeruleum, E. radiosum, and E. spectabile showing sex chromosome turnover has occurred repeatedly. Top right: Phylogeny showing sex chromosome turnover in darters and non-darter percids. Chromosome 9 is the putative ancestral sex chromosome, shared by Perca flavescens and multiple members of the orangethroat darter complex (e.g., E. spectabile, E. pulchellum). Bottom: Schematic depicting repeated turnover of sex chromosomes as a mechanism to resolve mitonuclear conflict and promote speciation.

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking forward to the awesome @elliecat.bsky.social’s lecture today in our EEB seminar series! “Not All Bad News: Minor Genomic Impacts of Population Declines in Brown Bears” Noon Pacific in the Gold Auditorium, Shiley Biosciences Center. See ya there!

Dept of Plant Biology at UIUC hiring in any subdiscipline of Mycology and/or Plant-Fungal Interactions tenure-track faculty position at the assistant professor level.
Apply by Oct 31, 2025. For complete details including salary and benefit information, visit go.illinois.edu/PlantBiolfac...

Line drawing of a two story institutional building with a sign in front, "Welcome to the BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT. It has been 3 days since we discovered something existentially horrifying about abugs that make you question your whole reality."

The new XKCD has to be a reference to the ant paper where ants just casually lay eggs of a different species, yes? Maybe? There are so many weird bugs its hard to know.

Our EEB department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hiring an assistant professor in evo-devo. See go.illinois.edu/EEBAsstProf for details. Please share!

Hello bluesky community!

I'm hiring a postdoc to do machine learning in population genetics.
Starting to build up a lab at Indiana University Bloomington where I just started a faculty position.
Apply with the below link: indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/30325

bumping again: I am hiring a project coordinator /researcher for an interagency freshwater mussels project (USFS 🌲 lead). Position will be based out of USFS Northern Research Station in Wisconsin and starts Sep. 15, For more information/to apply, www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/438...

Different populations of the Antarctic notothen fish Trematomus scotti differ in key life history traits Antarctic notothenioid fish form an adaptive radiation that diversified in the Southern Ocean over the past 10 million years. The biology and life his…

Environmental conditions influence life history traits, but what about in Antarctic fish?🐟🇦🇶
We compared two pops of Crowned Notothens Trematomus scotti: one from a fjord of the Antarctic Peninsula and one from the Weddell Sea.
Their life histories traits were very different!
tinyurl.com/mtmmrv8w
🧪🌎🐧

OrthoFinder just dropped a major update

It’s faster, more accurate, and ready for thousands of genomes

Let’s break it down (1/10)

github.com/OrthoFinder/...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@ramencult.bsky.social et al. use spatially explicit simulations and genomic data from Anopheles gambiae, showing that selection changes the joint distribution of allele frequency and geographic range.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf141

#molbio #evobio

A bibliography for the 2025 IDEA plenary The recording of my talk for the 2025 IDEA plenary is now posted over on the Evolution meeting YouTube channel (there’s a bunch of dead air at the start of the recording; the action starts a …

The recording of my IDEA talk is up on the #Evol2025 YouTube channel, and I've thrown that together with a PDF copy of the slide deck and a bibliography: lab.jbyoder.org/2025/06/21/a...