The Molecular Ecologist Podcast

In this episode, Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, Kelle Freel, and Rishi De-Kayne chat with Jeremy Yoder about a pandemic-focused Darwin Day symposium, the phylogenetic conservation of a bioluminescence symbiosis, and the online iteration of a venerable population genetics conference. Links to the things we discuss: The UAB Darwin Day event — and online video of the talks The phylogenetics of cardinalfishes, which host light-producing, environmentally acquired symbiotic bacteria Rishi's PopGroup conference interviews The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock," performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.

In this episode, Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, R Shawn Abrahams, and Jeremy Yoder chat about their experiences managing research, teaching, and scientific conferences in the year of COVID-19. (This episode was recorded back in October, but production’s been delayed because of, well, everything. It’s still a pretty good retrospective on a  strange and challenging year!) Links to things we discuss: The Research Coordinated Network for Evolution in Changing Seas One of the most widely-tweeted talks from the online Botany 2020 meeting is this presentation on the evolutionary genetics of flower development by Min Ya — there doesn’t seem to be a central list, but lots of talks from the conference turn up in a YouTube search. You can find the podcast hosted on Anchor.fm, or on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience. The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock,” performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.

In this episode, we turn to a question that every academic scientist has to answer at some point: How do you choose a scientific journal to receive your paper? Kelle Freel, Shawn Abrahams, Katie Grogan and Jeremy Yoder chat about what they like in a journal, what they consider when picking a publication venue for a new paper, and the various meanings of an "impact factor." JANE, the Journal/Author Name Estimator, will select candidate journals based on a sample of text from your paper's abstract. The Wikipedia article on impact factors is a quick overview of the metric's history and criticisms. There have been multiple studies of the effect Twitter attention may have on a paper's eventual citation count — one for ecology specifically was published in PLOS ONE in 2018. The study establishing a "chaperone effect" in which papers are more likely to be published at a high-impact journal if one of the authors has published in the journal before is on the PNAS website. The recent study of unprofessional peer reviewer comments by Nyssa Silbiger and Amanda Stubler is on the PeerJ website. You can find the podcast hosted on Anchor.fm, or on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience. The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock," performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.

In this episode, Sarah Shainker tells us about how population genetic structure works differently in river drainages; Kelle Freel recaps her reading on the history of rabbits and rabbit-killing viruses in Australia; Jeremy Yoder reports on his misadventures in sourdough starter cultivation and the community genetics of everyone’s new favorite hobby; and Katie Grogan talks about the sites she follows for professional development tips, going all the way back to grad school. You can hear more about the history of rabbit introduction and (attempts at) ecological management in Australia on these two episodes of Stuff You Missed in History Class. There’s more testimony and recommendations to fight racism in science, and our fields specifically, in this Nature feature, this editorial in Nature Ecology and Evolution, and this open letter to the EEB community on Medium. You can find the podcast hosted on Anchor.fm, or on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience. The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock,” performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.

The Molecular Ecologist Podcast is a conversation about ecology, evolution, and everything in between, with contributors to The Molecular Ecologist discussing the science and science-adjacent issues they've been reading and writing about. In this episode,  Patrícia Chrzanová Pečnerová discusses resources for using color to make scientific figures clear and appealing; Stacy Krueger-Hadfield tells us about the complex considerations surrounding tracking and controlling species invasions in the Antarctic; Melissa Walker gives us a tour of the truly weird biology of viruses big enough to measure in millimeters Katie Grogan recaps her series of posts on the costs — in terms of time, money, and emotional impact — of applying for tenure-track faculty jobs; and we also mention Laetitia Wilkins's contribution on the costs of not (yet) landing one of those jobs. You can find the podcast hosted on Anchor.fm, or on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience.

On this episode, we're taking our #NewPI Chat conversations among early-career faculty to the podcast format. In this chat, Rob Denton, Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, and Jeremy Yoder discuss teaching: the transition from postdoc life to managing classrooms and curricula, juggling instruction time and research — and how all of this has changed while our campuses are locked down to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic. To send us questions about life as new PIs, or suggest topics or guests for future chats, you can leave us a voice message from the podcast's Anchor.fm page, hit us up on Twitter or Facebook, or email Jeremy. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed URL directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience. The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson's "The Waltzing Cat," performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.

The Molecular Ecologist Podcast made it to a second episode! Thanks for listening to our first one, and for all the positive comments. In addition to our "home" hosting service, Anchor.fm, you can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed URL directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience. On this episode, Stacy Krueger-Hadfield and Sabrina Heiser talk about Stacy's #StudentScicomm initiative, using science blogging as an assignment in graduate-level professional development and science courses. Kelle Freel describes the results of a community genetics survey of diversity within an algae bloom that travels the North Atlantic every year, by Bolaños et al. (doi: 10.1038/s41396-020-0636-0) R. Shawn Abrams previews an upcoming post about new research supporting the hypothesis that symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria had a single origin in the common ancestor of the clade that includes legumes, roses, and oaks. Jeremy Yoder recaps a new simulation study that shows how populations distributed continuously across space (which is to say, most natural populations) confound and complicate population genetic analyses, by Battey et al. (doi: 10.1534/genetics.120.303143) The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock," performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.

In the inaugural episode of the Molecular Ecologist Podcast, a panel of contributors to The Molecular Ecologist recap the science they've been reading and writing about over the past month. On this episode: Kelle Freel talks about a nifty study of the microbes that help whales digest plankton, by Carolyn A. Miller et al. (doi: 10.1038/s41396-019-0549-y) Patrícia Pečnerová describes how endangered Alpine Ibex populations have lost genetic diversity but are still purging deleterious mutations, as described in a paper by Christine Grossen et al. (doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-14803-1) R Shawn Abrams recaps his post about the history of African Americans studying evolution, and what it will take to broaden the diversity of the field, citing a recent paper by Joseph Graves (doi: 10.1186/s12052-019-0110-5) Jeremy Yoder discusses a study that finds substantial hybridization between the endemic Northwest crow and the much more widespread American crow, by David Slager et al. (doi: 10.1111/mec.15377) You can find more from The Molecular Ecologist at molecularecologist.com, follow updates on Twitter at @molecologist, or find us on Facebook at The Molecular Ecologist. The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock," performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.