News & Events

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.

The first PhD thesis in the MARM project was succesfully defended by Xiaoyan Long on 17 May:

Long X (2022). The evolution of parental sex roles. University of Groningen, 196 p., doi: 10.33612/diss.217284138, download thesis, propositions

The first paper of 2022 has been published online:

Riederer JM, Tiso S, van Eldijk TJB, Weissing FJ (2022). Capturing the facets of evolvability in a mechanistic framework. Trends Ecol Evol, doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2022.01.004, download pdf

Several members of the MARM group presented their work during the Virtual Evolution 2021 conference (June 21-25, 2021):

Timo van Eldijk: Uniting community ecology and evolutionary rescue theory – Community-wide rescue leads to a rapid loss of rare species

Xiaoyan Long: Individual variation in parental care drives divergence of sex roles

Emiliano Méndez Salinas & Magdalena Kozielska: Modeling the evolution of associative learning

We are happy to announce that former MARM and GELIFES PhD student Stefany Moreno Gámez will be awarded the John Maynard Smith Prize 2021 of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) for her PhD thesis “On the origin and function of phenotypic variation in bacteria”. Stefany defended her thesis, supervised by professors G.S. van Doorn and F.J. Weissing, last December and was awarded the highest distinction, cum laude.

The Award Committee justifies the decision as follows:

The committee was particularly impressed by the breadth of your interests, combined with the thoroughness of the approaches you used to tackle diverse, yet always fascinating, issues. Also, the fact that you combine mathematical modelling to generate predictions with well thought-through and often methodologically-challenging experiments to test these predictions was highly appreciated.

The JMS Prize comes with an invitation to give the JMS Prize 2021 lecture at the next ESEB congress in August 2022 in Prague, Czech Republic. In addition, the JMS prize comes with a monetary prize of 2500 €, the possibility of a six-months Junior Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, and the invitation to write a review for the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

Recently Apu Ramesh presented her work (in collaboration with Jakob Gismann) “Movement tendencies in migrant and resident sticklebacks” during the ASAB Easter Meeting (14-16 April 2021).