William James Lecture Hall, B1, 33 Kirkland Street
Title:Foraging in a Complex World: From Individual Flight Performance to Collective Behavior in Bumblebees (Bombus impatiens)
Abstract: Foraging is a crucial and remarkably complex behavior that is key to survival. For social insects such as bumblebees, successful foraging depends on a combination of individual traits (e.g. physiological and biomechanical performance of individual workers) and collective behavioral strategies for regulating food intake at the colony level. Here, I use foraging...
Biological Labs Main Lecture Hall, 16 Divinity Avenue
Gonzalo Giribet Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology "Working towards a resolved animal tree of life: Big challenges and possible solutions"
Title:Ecology and Evolution of the Ferns of Moorea and Tahiti, French Polynesia
Abstract: Ferns are the only major clade of land plants with haploid (gametophyte) and diploid (sporophyte) stages that can grow separately from each other for extended periods. The ecology of fern gametophytes, which represent the sexual part of the life cycle, is very poorly known due to their small size and cryptic morphology. In contrast, the conspicuous...
Title: Estimating TMRCA, Modeling the Fixed Pedigree, and the Effect of the Y Chromosome on the Chromatin Landscape
Abstract:This thesis consists of three different chapters on very different topics.
Chapter 1: We demonstrate the advantages of using information at many unlinked loci in order to better calibrate estimates of the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) at a...