NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

Statistical estimators, distributions and simple tests.

NA

NA

From millions of wildebeest herd crossing political borders in Serengeti to minuscule bacterial colony moving across agar gel in a petri-plate, migratory behavior can be seen at all scales. Migration has evolved multiple times independently in many animal groups, such as birds, fish, mammals (including marine mammals and bats), and reptiles (e.g. sea turtles) and insects. The tradeoffs between the costs and benefits for the evolution and sustenance of migration have been studied in detail. Although evolution of migration in most cases is a response to seasonal variation in resources, its occurrence and extent depend on many factors such as physical, geographical, historical and ecological which may facilitate and/or constrain the evolution of long-distance migration. Because migration includes a suite of traits, selection of the migratory character will ultimately cause indirect selection on correlated traits and vice versa, and potentially also on traits that have consequences beyond just migration. Testing such interactions require comparison across taxa at large scales. Lack of sufficient data as well as suitable comparative tools have been a major limiting factor to carry out such studies.
For my PhD thesis I plan to investigate the interplay of different selection pressures in defining the course of evolution of migration for passerine birds with more than 5000 species. For this, I have considered two scenarios. In first scenario, I will investigate the evolution of two traits (migration and group foraging) that are likely to facilitate the evolution of each other. In second scenario both the traits (migration and ornamentation) are under different selection pressures and expected to constrain the evolution of each other. To test both these scenarios I am using phylogenetic comparative approaches. In my first chapter, I will test the robustness of three approaches to phylogenetic comparative methods and ancestral state reconstruction to features of our large data sets. I will use simulations where we know the exact evolutionary trajectory and test inferences based on three methods, APE package in R, Mesquite and BayesTraits. In the second chapter I will examine the evolution of group migration in passerine birds and check if group foraging facilitates the evolution of group migration. In the third chapter, I will focus on the interaction of sexual ornamentation with migration and test if the ornamentations which directly impede migration.

Dynamic evolution of olfactory receptor genes in mammals: Possible link to anatomy and ecology
Yoshihito Niimura

Olfaction, the sense of smell, is essential for the survival of most animals. It is used for foraging, communicating with conspecifics, and recognizing predators. Diverse odor molecules in the environment are detected by olfactory receptors (ORs) expressed in the olfactory epithelium of the nasal cavity. There are ~400 and ~1,100 OR genes in the human and mouse genomes, respectively, constituting the largest multigene family in mammals. Bioinformatic analyses using various genome sequences revealed that the numbers of OR genes vary greatly among species: African elephants have the largest number of functional OR genes ever examined, with ~2,000, while bottlenose dolphins, which have completely lost the olfactory apparatus, retain only ~10.
In my talk, I would like to introduce our recent study on the degeneration of OR genes in primate evolution, since it provides an excellent example of how anatomical/ecological factors affect the OR gene repertoire in each species. I will also briefly mention preliminary results on the OR genes in Asian elephants.

Population history of whales (and elephants) based on individual whole-genome sequences
Takushi Kishida

Speciation in the open ocean has long been studied, but it remains largely elusive how populations of highly mobile animals, such as whales, in such an open environment become reproductively isolated. Baleen whales of the genus Balaenoptera undertake extensive migrations, and there are few obvious barriers that potentially isolate their populations in the open ocean. In this talk, population history of common minke whales B. acutorostrata and Antarctic minke whales B. bonaerensis was inferred based on the whole genome sequence data of an individual, and discuss about speciation of these two species using such recently-developed genomics tools. I will also talk about very preliminary data on the demographic history of Indian elephants and presence of a bottleneck during the last glacial period.