News & Events

The fifth PhD thesis in the MARM project, and the first in 2023, was succesfully defended by Christoph Netz on 30 May:

Netz CFG (2023). Evolution in a complicated world. University of Groningen, 205 p., doi: 10.33612/diss.658832457, download thesis, propositions

The next PhD thesis in the MARM project was successfully defended by Jia Zheng on 21 November:

Zheng J (2022). Evolutionary ecology of the variable breeding system of Chinese penduline tits. University of Groningen, 199 p., doi: 10.33612/diss.249069345.

The third PhD thesis in the MARM project was succesfully defended by Pratik Gupte on 27 September:

Gupte PR (2022). Animal movement strategies. University of Groningen, 246 p., doi: 10.33612/diss.242140787, download thesis, propositions

The second PhD thesis in the MARM project was succesfully defended by Apu Ramesh on 30 August:

Ramesh A (2022). Animal personalities on the move. University of Groningen, 162 p., doi: 10.33612/diss.232778934, download thesis, propositions

The 2022 Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) took place in Prague, Czech Republic, on the 14-19th of August. A number of current and former MARM group members presented their work:

Talks:
Jana Riederer: The role of sexual selection in shaping adaptive radiations
Christoph Netz: Hamilton’s force of selection during ontogenesis
Stefany Moreno Gamez: From patterns to processes: Towards a mechanistic understanding of the human microbiome (John Maynard Smith Prize winner talk)
Daniel Elsner: Transposable elements mark tissue specific aging in termite workers

Posters:
Xiaoyan Long: The evolution of sex roles: New insights from individual-based simulations
Sergio Gonzalez: Learning to cope: The effect of population bottlenecks in the maintenance
of complex adaptations

During the International Society for Behavioral Ecology Congress in Stockholm, Sweden (28th July – 2nd August, 2022) several MARMots presented their work in talks or as a poster:

Franjo Weissing and Xiaoyan Long: Joint evolution of parental effort and the primary sex ratio
Pratik Gupte: Novel pathogen introduction rapidly alters the evolution of movement, restructuring animal societies
Apu Ramesh: Human-induced isolation causes rapid behavioral divergence with genetic underpinning in resident and migrant stickleback
Victoria Rostovtseva: Understanding cooperativeness in humans (presentation url: https://vimeo.com/732109758/75c72dd6e5)

Several MARM group members presented their work during the European Conference of Behavioural Biology that took place on the 20^th-23^rd July 2022 in Groningen (NL).

Franjo Weissing gave the opening keynote lecture on Reconciling mechanistic and functional perspectives on behaviour.

Other group members also gave talks:
Jia Zheng: Egg burial protects eggs from rolling out the wind-swayed nest in Chinese penduline tits
Apu Ramesh: Individual personalities and not the social context predict movement tendencies in three-spined sticklebacks
Ines Daras Modelling cultural transmission: Do learning mechanisms matter?

Our group also presented a number of posters:
Jakob Gismann: Personality-dependent dispersal and breeding success in three-spined sticklebacks

Darshak Bhatt attended the Dutch Tumor Immunology Meeting (DTIM 2022) and won the PhD Award for his talk Modelling the spatial dynamics of oncolytic virotherapy that reports on the recent model he developed together with Thijs Janzen and Franjo Weissing.

On the 7^th and 8^th June the annual meeting of the Dutch Society for Theoretical Biology (NVTB) took place in Schoorl, NL. The meeting was co-organized by two members of the MARM group that are part of the NVTB board – Magdalena Kozielska and Timo van Eldijk.

Franjo Weissing gave one of the keynote lectures: Evolution of sex roles – Individual-based simulations versus analytical predictions and a number of MARMots presented their work:

Jana Riederer Capturing the facets of evolvability in a mechanistic framework

Jia Zheng: Effects of season length and uniparental care efficiency on the evolution of parental care

Inès Daras: Plasmid dynamics in the context of resource competition

Stefano Tiso: Finding a mutational switch – A simple model for the evolution of a bias towards adaptive mutations

Jana Riederer attended the European Meeting for PhD Students in Evolutionary Biology (EMPSEB27, 22-27 May 2022, Espoo, Finland) and won the award for the Best Oral Presentation for her talk The role of sexual selection in shaping an adaptive radiation.