Good News Roundup

Welcome Back, Wolverines!  What better way to kick off the post–spring break season than with something truly fresh? We’re excited to introduce a brand new column—your go-to spot for EEB news. With everyone returning recharged and ready for a new chapter, we can’t wait to dive in and bring you stories, updates, and publication news that make the rest of the semester even brighter.

• UMich News has a great story up about work by Teresa Pegan (PhD '23), Vera Ting, Brett Benz, and Ben Winger published in American Naturalist. In the paper, they compare wing tip shape of migratory versus sedentary populations of a widespread songbird, the Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia), to deconstruct variation in the individual skeletal and feather components of the hand-wing. (By the way, Vera minored in EEB, went on to be an artist in residence at UMBS, and now is a professional artist with an impressive portfolio you can check out here). 

• LSA News had a great news story that was perfectly timed for Valentines Day about the hidden history of romantic flowers, featuring Thais Vasconcelos. 

• Professor Catherine Badgley is giving a TED Talk at TEDxUofM on Saturday March 14.

• Jiachen Li (a student in Bioinformatics) and Professor George Zhang have an impressive paper in Nature Communications titled "Repeatability of gene expression evolution in experimental environmental adaptation".  Read more about Dr. Zhang's work in EEB, here. 

• Michael Hogan, Ramon Nagesan, Alison Davis Rabosky and friends have a new paper in a Special Feature of Toxins on Inter- and Intraspecific Venom Variation in the Reclusive Rear-Fanged Black-Striped Snakes (Coniophanes). There are some really cool CT scans in the paper that are worth checking out.