A Lightning Talk at Society for the Study of Evolution Meeting in Austin, Texas 2016

In collaboration with Felipe Barreto from Oregon State University and Ron Burton from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I gave a talk on red carotenoid production from inter-population hybrids of the marine copepod, Tigriopus californicus.

Building of decades of work from Ron Burton's lab at Scripps including excellent work by Felipe Barreto in the past 5 years that has shown that mitochondrial dysfunction is a consistent consequence of interpopulation hybrids, we co-opted this system to test a new hypothesis for the production of red carotenoids in animals. We are still working on writing this up and expanding our ideas with ongoing experiments, so I won't go in to all the details, but we found that hybrids produced less of the red carotenoid astaxanthin compared to the parental generations. Using this species of copepod as a model systems to investigate the physiological constraints on red carotenoid production in animals stands to provide huge insights for understanding the evolution of honest signaling from carotenoid ornaments.