A story that starts out claiming that alternative phenotypes are excellent to study eco-evolutionary feedbacks, but ditches this idea to end on the notion that eco-evolutionary change is centred around evolving developmental systems. It is a personal journey of stepping out of the comfort zone of mainstream eco-evolutionary thinking, and of formulating arguments to convince…

A 15 min talk can be found here that explains why unusually paced life history strategies of marine megafauna drive atypical sensitivities to environmental change. The talk accompanies the following paper: Smallegange IM, Flotats Avilés M, Eustache K. 2020. Unusually paced life history strategies of marine megafauna drive atypical sensitivities to environmental variability. Frontiers in…

By Isabel Smallegange & Matty Berg. Originally published in Amsterdam Science 11(3). Climate variability is increasing. How will this affect different plant and animal species? The answer to this question is important to inform conservation strategies. Our research shows that we should not rely solely on big-data research to find the answer. Instead we should…

Jamie and Skander from The Human Odyssey interviewed me to discuss population dynamics around bulb mites, beach hoppers and manta rays, as well as what it means for certain individuals to evolve certain traits. A very enjoyable chat! You can listen to it here.

Big data In biology, data on species abundance, diversity and traits are collected within large, international collaborative  projects, citizen science projects, and permanent monitoring stations. These data are made openly available in big biodiversity databases: big data. Below I highlight some problems that big data approaches can have, which is particularly worrying if analysis outcomes are…

Myriad species exist where males within the same population display alternative morphologies, often referred to as minors and majors (“lovers and fighters”), that are associated with different ways of gaining access to mates. Their coexistence is typically explained using sexual selection theory. However, other explanations exist, but they have not been explored in great depth…

A blog post by Kathryn Stewart (@Kat_A_Stewart) on our paper “ The role of genetic diversity in the evolution and maintenance of environmentally-cued, male alternative reproductive tactics” by Stewart et al. (2019), published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. 19:58. Philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and scientists have pitted nature vs. nurture against one another for a long time. In fact,…

To contribute towards integrating the field of eco-evolutionary dynamics and move the field forward, scientific journals from the British Ecological Society, including the Journal of Animal Ecology, have just published a cross-journal special feature entitled “Eco-evolutionary dynamics across scales”, edited by Franziska Brunner, Jacques Deere, Martijn Egas, Christophe Eizaguirre and Joost Raeymaekers. How evolutionary changes…

We are in great need of an integrative framework that allows ecologists to predict life history strategies (i.e. the different ways in which individuals trade-off resource investment into survival or reproduction) from functional traits: traits of individuals that inform on the performance of a population of plants or animals as a whole. To contribute towards…

If you have read some about bulb mites (Rhizoglyphus robini), you might know that adult males show one of two distinct morphs: fighters, which have these thickened legs with sharp ends that they can use to kill other mites, and scramblers (see photo on the right). These two types of males occur in single populations…