2018

Martin Nowak

Partners and Rivals in Direct Reciprocity

April 27, 2018

A new study by Martin Nowak examines how strategies can foster or destroy cooperation.  “If you consider all strategies of direct reciprocity, a very small subset of them are either partners or rivals, but evolution always leads to one or the other,” says Nowak. The study in Nature Human Behavior  finds that across repeated interactions, the environment that individuals find themselves in...

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New Spider Family Tree Tries to Untangle the Evolution of Webs

New Spider Family Tree Tries to Untangle the Evolution of Webs

April 27, 2018

A long-running and fiercely debated question among scientists "Did spiders evolve to spin the orb web only once? Or multiple times?" may have an answer in a new study in Current Biology, led by a team of researchers including Gonzalo Giribet and postdoctoral fellow, Rosa Fernández. The research team compared approximately 2,500 genes from 159...

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Water from the sea floor "migrates" into Earth's crust and flows through the horizontal aquifer. Credit: Girguis Lab, Harvard University

Microbes in Aquifers Beneath Mid-Atlantic Ridge 'Chow Down' on Carbon

April 23, 2018

Peter Girguis and Sunita Shah Walter, University of Delaware (former Postdoc in Girguis lab), led a research team that has shown underground aquifers near the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge act like natural biological reactors, pulling in cold, oxygenated seawater, and allowing microbes to consume more refractory carbon than scientists believed. The study's results published in...

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Peter Girguis

Peter Girguis Awarded Star Family Challenge

April 21, 2018
Congratulations to Peter Girguis who, in partnership with Aspen Reese, Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, was awarded the 2018 Star Family Challenge for their project, “Collecting and Protecting Microbiomes: Leveraging Natural History Collections to Study Microbial Communities.”
Platyrrhinus helleri bat in The Chucantí Nature Reserve, in Serranía de Majé

Bats, Flies on Bats and the Fungi That Feeds on the Flies!

April 13, 2018

During a fieldtrip to Panama last summer, PhD student Danny Haelewaters (Pfister Lab) worked with a team of six researchers -- including PhD student Jasmin Camacho (Hoekstra Lab) -- to capture bats using mistnets for seven subsequent nights in a cloud-forested reserve in Darien, Panama. The team captured 227 bats representing 17 species to study the bat's parasitic associations. Their findings, published in...

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