Evolution & Ecology

When UC Davis student Madison “Madi” Burns joined the Davis Rewilding Society during her freshman year, it helped bring her future into focus. The second-year landscape architecture major said she has developed a much better understanding of the importance of native plants from her involvement with the student-run organization.

“Being part of the club has really expanded my knowledge and has made an impact on what I want to do with my life and my career,” Burns said. “I want to design spaces to incorporate native species.”

Three UC Davis faculty members are among 125 recipients of this year’s Sloan Research Fellowships, prestigious awards given by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to early-career scientific researchers seen as emerging leaders in their fields.

The 2023 fellows, including UC Davis’ Kate L. Laskowski, Jesús M. Velázquez and Alexander S. Wein, “represent the most promising scientific researchers working today,” the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation said in announcing its selections Feb. 15.

Early this year, graduate students in the Scientific Filmmaking course (ECL 290/PBG 298) shared their short films at the Ecology Film Festival, which was held at both the Bodega Bay Grange Hall and at the Veterans Memorial Theatre in Davis.

From Chilean tidepools to the High Sierra, 12 UC Davis graduate students traveled the world this summer in search of answers to ecology’s most pressing questions.

In the blazing 100-degree Texas sun, Jon Aguiñaga waded through polluted waters on the side of freeways to capture tiny fish, which he then ran experiments on in the garage of an Airbnb. Marissa Sandoval flew to Florida to extract sexual-selection perfumes from the green inflorescent legs of orchid bees. MJ Farruggia trekked more than 1,000 miles in the Sierra backcountry for 240 days and is “still not tired of it.”

He quipped that he was "going to cover 40 years of science in 40 minutes."

And UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Harris Lewin, renowned for his research in comparative mammalian genomics and immunogenetics, did just that when he delivered the inaugural UC Davis New Emeriti Distinguished Lecture on “From Chickens to Cows to Everything: Perspectives from 40 Years in Science."

As winter approaches, many species of animals — from bears and squirrels to parasitic wasps and a few lucky humans — hunker down for some needed rest. The northern star coral (Astrangia poculata) also enters a hibernating state of dormancy, or quiescence, during this time. But what happens to its microbiome while it’s sleeping?

Under the right living arrangement, disease-resistant corals can help “rescue” corals that are more vulnerable to disease, found a study from the University of California, Davis, that monitored a disease outbreak at a coral nursery in Little Cayman, Cayman Islands. 

UC Davis is a collaborating partner in a new European effort to use DNA data to characterize and conserve life on Earth. The Biodiversity Genomics Europe consortium, launched Sept. 26, is affiliated with the Earth BioGenome Project, which has its administrative headquarters at UC Davis. Harris Lewin, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, chairs the EBP Working Group.

When you’re experimenting with water, electricity and live animals, a lot can go wrong if you’re not careful. And no one knows more about that than Rachael Bay and her research team.

They study human-induced changes in the environment and evolutionary processes — things like climate change, coral bleaching and bird migration. And when you’re doing that kind of work — handling chloroform one day and blood samples the next — you want to make sure you’re not cutting corners.

Every modern mammal, from a platypus to a blue whale, is descended from a common ancestor that lived about 180 million years ago. We don’t know a great deal about this animal, but the organization of its genome has now been computationally reconstructed by an international team of researchers. The work is published Sept. 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.