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What is a species?  A simple question that just about anyone can answer, and yet has been the source of endless debate for decades. Biological diversity just doesn't fit in nice neat little boxes no matter how much we search for a universal species concept. In this episode of the BioAudio podcast Prof. Eryn McFarlane is back to talk about some of the most commonly used definitions of a species, and why they all seem to fail in the end.  The diversity of life defies definition. 

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This is an encore presentation of the third episode I made of the BioAudio Podcast. I am re-posting the first three episodes form season 1 because they also set the stage for new content in Season 2. So before we get into new conversations, please follow along with my conversation with Dr. Dave Hone on the evidence used by  Charles Darwin to argue that natural selection was the mechanism driving evolution. Next week we start with new content on BioAudio, but for now continue on with this encore presentation. 

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This is an encore presentation of the second episode I made of the BioAudio Podcast. Season 2 is an introduction of Evolution and Ecology. So before we get into new content, I am re-posting a conversation with Dr. Dave Hone on the life of Charles Darwin and what led him to write one of the word's most famous books. 

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This is an encore presentation of the first episode I made of the BioAudio Podcast. Season 2 is an introduction of Evolution and Ecology. So we will start with an encore presentation of a discussion I had with Prof. Mark Vicari on the sorts of debates and discussions about evolution that happened before Charles Darwin came along.  Many students mistakenly think Darwin "invented" evolution but the question of whether species were fixed or changed through time was discussed and debated for thousands of years before he was born. This is a quick overview of some of the past ideas about the nature of species. 

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An introduction to season two of the BioAudio podcast. Welcome.

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In the final episode of this season of the BioAudio podcast we talk about counter current exchange - a low energy system used by birds, fish, diving mammals etc. to recycle heat, move oxygen out of water and into blood and even make it possible to drink salt water. But the same system is used in industry, most recently in the news in heat pumps which move heat along gradients to both heat and cool your home. Inside a heat pump is a clever counter current exchange system which sounds a lot like the legs of a bird legs. We'll compare these two technologies - it's evolution in parallel with climate saving technology on the BioAudio podcast. Thanks to Dr. Kevin Kerr, Silas Barrette and Dr. Leif Einarson. 

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In this episode of the BioAudio podcast we take a look at the emerging field of evolutionary medicine. This discipline asks not "how should we cure X?" but "why are we susceptible to X in the first place, what adaptation has gone wrong?" and these new types of questions are leading to interesting ideas about treatment of common problems. Evolutionary medicine asks us to rethink the question of why we get sick. 

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In this episode of the BioAudio podcast Prof. Eryn McFarlane and I discuss the role of hybridization in evolutionary ecology, what they are, how they persist and what the consequences might be. Along the way we will talk about the influence of human behavior in hybridization, some of the threats to populations and the existence of "magic traits" which can cause rapid speciation under gene flow. 

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In this episode of the BioAudio podcast Professor Christina Davy and I discuss (and sometimes debate) the role of genetic tools in applied conservation. We will talk about what information we can gain, how we might use it and how these methods interact with policy decisions. We also look at the recent population history of the little brown bat, who's population has undergone one of the largest bottleneck events due to disease ever recorded. We will talk about how molecular tools have been used to understand the crash, the survivors and can inform correct conservation action now to try and preserve the remaining populations. 

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The Ambsystoma salamanders of the great lakes region have the most peculiar mating system.. they are all females, but they steal the genomes from other related species to aid in reproduction. This "kleptogenesis" is ancient, probably originating 5 million years ago. This makes it a stable reproductive strategy but it defies everything the text books tell us about species boundaries. In this episode Prof Katty Greenwald and I talk about what makes a species and how vague the term can really be.