Exciting news: Our next paper on the effects of hurricanes on Anoles has just been published in PNAS! Here’s a link to the paper. This study has been on my mind since our first paper about the lizards on Turks and Caicos before and after Hurricane Irma back in 2017. You can see some terrific … More Hurricane effects on Anoles
With all the fanfare about the lizards and leaf blowers there were a lot of unstated (and stated) questions about “what’s the use?” I headed off the questions when they were directed at me (or when I found them on twitter) but Don Lyman, who’s been following the Boston Lizard story for a while, wrote a … More Guest Repost: Lizards, Leaf Blowers, and the Value of Basic Research
Nature put together a terrific video explaining the findings of the Nature paper yesterday. I want to spread it far and wide: If you look closely, you’ll see that the video was produced by the extremely talented Jackie Turner who was actually one of the undergrads that came to Mpala with me almost 10 years … More A great video explaining the Nature Paper
This is a re-post of an entry I wrote on the Nature Ecology and Evolution blog. Serendipity in science is often celebrated as the lightning flash of insight from a chance event – Newton’s apple encounter or Fleming’s moldy petri dishes. Our recent paper, Hurricane-induced selection on the morphology of an island lizard, resulted from … More Behind the paper: Hurricane-induced selection on the morphology of an island lizard
I’ve been sitting on this story for months and I’m excited to finally be able to share it. Remember that work we did in Turks and Caicos last fall? Well, we found something pretty remarkable: the hurricanes caused big shifts in the lizard populations living on both Pine Cay and Water Cay that may have … More Hurricane-induced selection on the morphology of an island lizard
I’ve spent the last two months working in a new desk (and new zip code) and have yet to update you all. Sorry! Surprise, I’m spending this year in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, working with Dr. Jonathan Losos. The goal is to think more about evolution in my Greek lizards. As you … More Lizards at Harvard
I mentioned a couple of posts ago that a paper a friend and I wrote had just been published. I’ve tried to distill the message down to four paragraphs and I’m anxious to spark some conversations about the potential for ecology and evolutionary studies in cities. Comment below or send me an email and let’s … More Adaptive evolution in urban ecosystems
Colin Donihue 