It’s because they couldn’t stop staring at the bird’s clown face.

At the end of a productive scouting and networking trip to Fiji. It was such a treat to see the species (and some additional specimens) that I worked on from afar during my PhD. Even more exciting was to meet long-term collaborators and connect with new ones. Excited to return next year!

Already missing the #Evol2025 meeting in verdant Athens! It was inspiring to hear the amazing science everyone has been doing, and as always, see old and meet new evolutionary biologists.

Excited for #Evol2025! I'll be sharing work on the island size-genetic diversity relationship in the avifauna of the Solomon Islands. Come hear about results from single-radiation, comparative, and simulation work.

Check it out in Phylogeography 2 (Mon 6/23 11:15am, Athena GH)!

Stay tuned for more research on these whistlers, focusing on some fine-scale work on the contact zone, and how the lessons we learn from it can be applied to the rest of the genus!

Although the exact story has changed with genomic data, the important lesson of a lack of reproductive isolation upon secondary contact in these allopatric "great speciators" held true.

We used this data to revisit Mayr's 80 year old hypothesis (left), painting a picture of fast plumage evolution and post-contact gene flow within an archipelago as opposed to "failed" contact after inter-archipelago divergence.

There were other intermediates from the Ovalau, which were inferred as the first branch in the yellow-throated clade. However, this is because they are a hybrid population (more common on islands than zones) between an unsampled or genetically swamped population and one on nearby Viti Levu.

...because of a contact zone on the island of Vanua Levu between an unbanded and banded lineage. Island hybrid zones are quite rare in birds, so this is a particular great system for understanding allopatric speciation.

We found that the Fiji Whistlers represented a monophyletic group that recently and rapidly evolved the high plumage diversity that drove interest in the group. Notably, the white-throated lineages were non-monophyletic, and there was lots of uncertainty in the north part of the archipelago...

We sampled individuals from across the Fijian archipelago to test Mayr's hypotheses about the dynamics of secondary contact, particularly if there was evidence of hybridization after inter-archipelago colonization producing one of the main phenotypes in the archipelago.

Some species had an outsized role in shaping evolutionary theory. The Fiji Whistlers featured heavily in Ernst Mayr's development of the biological species concept and its application to allopatric taxa. In our new paper, we revisited this system with genomic data 🧵

doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

However, as you might expect, these variables are highly correlated with each other, both for the varied role pop size has on genomic diversity and analytical reasons. We attempted to disentangle them with LASSO regression, and inferred unique signals of derived TEs, ROH, and recent pop. size.

We found that most of these metrics correlated significantly with island size, showing the elevated role of drift in smaller islands. Note that this is the logarithm of island size, so it isn't a simple 1:1 relationship between Ne and our proxy for population size (think Lewontin's paradox).