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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.
31 Episodes
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Today 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.
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 wild populations.
In 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.
In 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.
In 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!
Today 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.
In 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.
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 definition.
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 continue on with this encore presentation.
This 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.
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 and debated for thousands of years before he was born. This is a quick overview of some of the past ideas about the nature of species.
An introduction to season two of the BioAudio podcast. Welcome.
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 sounds a lot like the legs of a bird legs. We'll compare these two technologies - it's evolution in parallel with climate saving technology on the BioAudio podcast. Thanks to Dr. Kevin Kerr, Silas Barrette and Dr. Leif Einarson.
In 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.
In 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.
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 tools have been used to understand the crash, the survivors and can inform correct conservation action now to try and preserve the remaining populations.
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 term can really be.
What makes a species invasive? Today on the BioAudio podcast my guest is Dr. Thais Bernos who is an expert in the genetics and genomics of invasive fish species. Her study subject is the tench fish introduced three times to Canada staring in the late 1800s but also introduced around the world as human populations moved and brought a favourite food with them. Join us to hear about what makes an invasion successful and how their evolutionary and population structure informs management.
Did you know that about half your genome is made of small bits of DNA called transposable elements? These "genomic parasites" are not genes, and they are not there to help run your body... they are small selfish elements out only to replicate themselves. They can cut themselves out of your genome, duplicate and re-enter you genome... and they can disrupt things as they go. Some of them appear to be ancient viruses, now there almost like fossils, some are highly dynamic bits of DNA. They are fascinating selfish elements ... and you are crammed full of them.
After many episodes about evolution, you might wonder... how did this all get going? Where did life come from? How did life itself start? In this episode Jacob Fine, a graduate student with a passion for RNA biology, takes us on a journey more than 4 billion years into the past... to explore what life might have looked light at the very start. We will talk about the "Darwinian threshold", LUCA, the last universal common ancestor and just what spark might have started evolution.
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