Author: Ian Wang

Mike Yuan was awarded a grant from the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology’s David and Marvalee Wake Fund to support his research on evolutionary convergence in Caribbean anoles.

Erin received a travel grant from the UC Berkeley Graduate Division. She will use the award to attend the Evolution Meeting in Providence, RI in June, where she will present her work on snake fang evolution.

Drew Hart was selected to receive a 2019 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award from the GSI Teaching and Resource Center. The award recognizes Drew’s exceptional achievements as a teacher for the computer lab section of our Landscape Ecology course.

Ian has a new paper on statistical phylogeography of the Anolis sericeus complex in Central America with collaborators Levi Gray, Anthony Barley, Steve Poe, Bob Thomson, and Adrian Nieto-Montes de Oca. This paper comprises the final chapter in Levi’s Ph.D. dissertation and is now published in Molecular Ecology.

32. Gray L.N., Barley A.J., Poe S., Thomson R.C.,
Nieto-Montes de Oca A., and Wang I.J. (2019) Phylogeography of a widespread lizard complex reflects patterns of both geographic and ecological isolation. Molecular Ecology, 28: 644-657.

Our lab won a UC Berkeley Excellence in Lab Safety Award – and that comes with a lab lunch and a door ribbon!

Erin Westeen has been awarded an ESPM starter grant, one of the top awards for 1st year Ph.D. students. The grant will support her work on the evolution of color variation in Sceloporus lizards.

Mike’s paper on phenotypic integration in claw and toepad traits in anoles was just accepted for publication in Evolution.  Mike assembled a massive dataset, with hundreds of specimens from dozens of species of Greater Antillean Anolis lizards, and performed a sophisticated phylogenetic and morphometric analyses that received overwhelmingly positive reviews.  This paper will be the first chapter of his dissertation, with more exciting projects to come!

Yuan M.L., Wake M.H., and Wang I.J. (accepted) Phenotypic integration between claw and toepad traits promotes microhabitat specialization in the Anolis adaptive radiation. Evolution.

Catherine Jung was awarded a $2,000 student-initiated independent research grant from UC Berkeley’s Sponsored Projects for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) Office.  The grant will support Catherine’s honors thesis project on how anoles recolonized areas damaged by volcanic eruptions on Montserrat.

With colleagues Andre Lourenco, Bernardo Antunes, and Guillermo Velo-Anton, Ian has a new paper out on “Fine-scale genetic structure in a salamander with two reproductive modes: Does reproductive mode affect dispersal?” in Evolutionary Ecology.  This paper explores whether populations of fire salamanders (Salamandra salamandra) with different reproductive modes (larviparous vs. pueriparous) exhibit differences in patterns of dispersal and genetic structure over very fine spatial scales.