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Welcome to BioAudio: The Teaching Podcast. After many years teaching biology in universities in the UK and in Canada I've come to the conclusion that we can do better than text books. I always want something more flexible, that can be updated with new topics and new discoveries. After years avoiding textbooks… I've created BioAudio a collection of discussions to accompany lectures in university biology courses . So let's ditch the textbook and just listen.
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Send us a text Today on the BioAudio podcast, it's all about dating! (no not that kind). Have you ever wondered how we figure out when things happened way in the past? When a scientist says "it's 100 million years old..." just how did they figure it out? Today I'm talking to Dr. Matthew Jones. He's a paleontologist at Arizona State University and his specialty is fossil mammals (though he admits he was a dinosaur kid). It's often his job to figure out just how old is this rock and he's going ...
Send us a text In this episode I"m joined by Bahar Roohshad, an undergraduate student from one of my classes to talk about phylogenetics. What are they? what are they for and how might we use on?
Send us a textWe keep hearing that biodiversity is in decline. But what does this mean? How is biodiversity distributed and what does "decline" look like? In this episode PhD student Hadil Elsayed talks to us about her experience tracking insects in some of the most protected habitats in Canada.
Send us a textToday on the BioAudio podcast Prof Alex Mills returns to talk about how we recognize and describe an "ecological community" and the unique roll of keystone species, ecosystem engineers and apex predators. We will also talk about three famous trophic cascades, where the removal or introduction of a species has consequences that rebound across the entire system.
Send us a text This week on the BioAudio podcast we are talking about disease ecology with Prof Dan Becker. It's a field that combines mathematical modeling, ecology, evolution, medicine, veterinary science... and he actually got into this as a cultural anthropologist interested in social justice. How do you get from social justice to the fate of vampire bats in a fragmented ecosystem? tune in to find out in this episode of the BioAudio podcast where we explore community disease ecology in wi...
Send us a textIn this episode of the BioAudio podcast we revisit Natural Selection and Sexual Selection. I am joined by Professor Alex Mills and we are going to compare and contrast these two ideas. We talk about what kept Darwin up at night and how he solved the problem of the peacock's tail.
Send us a textIn this episode Prof. Gordon Fitch explains the ways that individuals from two different species can interact in the wild, and the evolutionary consequences of this for species evolution and the stability of ecosystems. We cover competition, predation, mutualism, commensalism and the co-evolution of species... we even manage to work in Darwin and Taylor Swift! This is what Darwin referred to as the "tangled bank", complicated to unravel and critical to survival.
Send us a textIn this episode Prof. Erin Fraser joins me for part two of our introduction to primary scientific literature. This time... did you know most of us don't read these "papers" from start to finish? in this episode we try to demystify the process and we admit... we have to look up words just like everyone else!
Send us a textToday in the BioAudio podcast part one of a two part session on scientific literature. Today Prof. Erin Fraser joins me to talk about what we mean by "primary scientific literature". We will go through the basic structure of a scientific "paper" and what each section is for. We are out to demystify the world of scientific writing on the BioAudio podcast.
Send us a textIn this episode of the BioAudio podcast I'm joined by Christian Nakla, a former student in my senior evolution class, someone who always had a good question for me. Now i'm flipping our roll and he's going to help explain how barriers to reproduction can lead to speciation. It's all about isolating barriers today on the BioAudio podcast.
Send us a text What is a species? A simple question that just about anyone can answer, and yet has been the source of endless debate for decades. Biological diversity just doesn't fit in nice neat little boxes no matter how much we search for a universal species concept. In this episode of the BioAudio podcast Prof. Eryn McFarlane is back to talk about some of the most commonly used definitions of a species, and why they all seem to fail in the end. The diversity of life defies de...
Send us a text This is an encore presentation of the third episode I made of the BioAudio Podcast. I am re-posting the first three episodes form season 1 because they also set the stage for new content in Season 2. So before we get into new conversations, please follow along with my conversation with Dr. Dave Hone on the evidence used by Charles Darwin to argue that natural selection was the mechanism driving evolution. Next week we start with new content on BioAudio, but for now contin...
Send us a textThis is an encore presentation of the second episode I made of the BioAudio Podcast. Season 2 is an introduction of Evolution and Ecology. So before we get into new content, I am re-posting a conversation with Dr. Dave Hone on the life of Charles Darwin and what led him to write one of the word's most famous books.
Send us a text This is an encore presentation of the first episode I made of the BioAudio Podcast. Season 2 is an introduction of Evolution and Ecology. So we will start with an encore presentation of a discussion I had with Prof. Mark Vicari on the sorts of debates and discussions about evolution that happened before Charles Darwin came along. Many students mistakenly think Darwin "invented" evolution but the question of whether species were fixed or changed through time was discussed ...
Send us a textAn introduction to season two of the BioAudio podcast. Welcome.
Send us a text In the final episode of this season of the BioAudio podcast we talk about counter current exchange - a low energy system used by birds, fish, diving mammals etc. to recycle heat, move oxygen out of water and into blood and even make it possible to drink salt water. But the same system is used in industry, most recently in the news in heat pumps which move heat along gradients to both heat and cool your home. Inside a heat pump is a clever counter current exchange system which s...
Send us a textIn this episode of the BioAudio podcast we take a look at the emerging field of evolutionary medicine. This discipline asks not "how should we cure X?" but "why are we susceptible to X in the first place, what adaptation has gone wrong?" and these new types of questions are leading to interesting ideas about treatment of common problems. Evolutionary medicine asks us to rethink the question of why we get sick.
Send us a textIn this episode of the BioAudio podcast Prof. Eryn McFarlane and I discuss the role of hybridization in evolutionary ecology, what they are, how they persist and what the consequences might be. Along the way we will talk about the influence of human behavior in hybridization, some of the threats to populations and the existence of "magic traits" which can cause rapid speciation under gene flow.
Send us a text In this episode of the BioAudio podcast Professor Christina Davy and I discuss (and sometimes debate) the role of genetic tools in applied conservation. We will talk about what information we can gain, how we might use it and how these methods interact with policy decisions. We also look at the recent population history of the little brown bat, who's population has undergone one of the largest bottleneck events due to disease ever recorded. We will talk about how molecular tool...
Send us a text The Ambsystoma salamanders of the great lakes region have the most peculiar mating system.. they are all females, but they steal the genomes from other related species to aid in reproduction. This "kleptogenesis" is ancient, probably originating 5 million years ago. This makes it a stable reproductive strategy but it defies everything the text books tell us about species boundaries. In this episode Prof Katty Greenwald and I talk about what makes a species and how vague the ter...
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