Kerry Reid

• PhD
• Research Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong

Recombination has long been considered the primary mechanism to bring beneficial alleles together, which can increase the speed of adaptation from standing genetic variation. Recombination is fundamental to the transporter hypothesis proposed to explain precise parallel adaptation in Threespine Stickleback. We studied an instance of freshwater adap...

The flat-headed loach (Oreonectes platycephalus) is a small fish inhabiting headwaters of hillstreams of southern China. Its local populations are characterized by low genetic diversity and exceptionally high differentiation, making it an ideal model for studying small population isolates’ persistence and adaptive potential. However, the lack of Or...

Accurate identification of evolutionarily significant units of rare and threatened organisms provides a foundation for effective management and conservation. Up to seven subspecies of the critically endangered Yellow‐crested Cockatoo ( Cacatua sulphurea ) have been described, four of which were commonly recognised pre‐2014. In the absence of genoty...

Being a fundamentally important genetic parameter and evolutionary force, estimates of germline mutation rates have many uses in evolutionary biology. However, accurate estimates of de novo mutation (DNM) rates are still relatively scarce even for extensively studied evolutionary biology models. We estimated DNM rates for the three-spined stickleba...

Many highly recognisable species lack genetic data important for conservation due to neglect over their hyperabundance. This likely applies to the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), one of the world’s most iconic parrots. The species is native to Australia, New Guinea and some surrounding Melanesian islands. Four subspecies are currently...

Whether populations adapt to similar selection pressures using the same underlying genetic variants depends on population history and the distribution of standing genetic variation at the metapopulation level. Studies of sticklebacks provide a case in point: when colonising and adapting to freshwater habitats, three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteu...

Many endangered species live in fragmented and isolated populations with low genetic variability, signs of inbreeding, and small effective population sizes - all features elevating their extinction risk. The flat-headed loach ( Oreonectes platycephalus) , a small noemacheilid fish, is widely across southern China, but only in the headwaters of hill...

Recent work has revealed the importance of contemporary evolution in shaping ecological outcomes. In particular, rapid evolutionary divergence between populations has been shown to impact the ecology of populations, communities, and ecosystems. While studies have focused largely on the role of adaptive divergence in generating ecologically importan...

The nine-spined stickleback (Pungitius pungitius) has been increasingly used as a model system in studies of local adaptation and sex chromosome evolution but its current reference genome assembly is far from perfect, lacking distinct sex chromosomes. We generated an improved assembly of the nine-spined stickleback reference genome (98.3% BUSCO com...

Recent discoveries of sex chromosome diversity across the tree of life have challenged the canonical model of conserved sex chromosome evolution and evoked new theories on labile sex chromosomes that maintain less differentiation and undergo frequent turnover. However, theories of labile sex chromosome evolution lack direct empirical support due to...

Recent discoveries of sex chromosome diversity across the tree of life have challenged the canonical model of conserved sex chromosome evolution and evoked new theories on labile sex chromosomes that maintain less differentiation and undergo frequent turnover. However, theories of labile sex chromosome evolution lack direct empirical support due to...

DNA methylation-derived epigenetic clocks offer the opportunity to examine aspects of age acceleration (ie, the difference between an individual’s biological age and chronological age), which vary among individuals and may better account for age-related changes in cognitive function than chronological age. Leveraging existing ambulatory cognitive a...

Mutation rate is a fundamental parameter in population genetics. Apart from being an important scaling parameter for demographic and phylogenetic inference, it allows one to understand at what rate new genetic diversity is generated and what the expected level of genetic diversity is in a population at equilibrium. However, except for well-establis...

Intraspecific phenotypic differentiation is of common place occurrence, but the degree to which it reflects phenotypic plasticity or local adaptation remains often unclear. To be considered as adaptive, the differentiation must be genetically based and exceed what could be expected by neutral processes only. Using laboratory reared full-sib family...

Whether populations adapt to similar selection pressures using the same underlying genetic variants depends on population history and the distribution of standing genetic variation at the metapopulation level. Studies of sticklebacks provide a case in point: when colonising and adapting to freshwater habitats, three-spined sticklebacks ( Gasteroste...

DNA methylation-derived epigenetic clocks offer the opportunity to examine aspects of age acceleration (i.e., the difference between an individual’s biological age and chronological age), which vary among individuals and may better account for age-related changes in cognitive function than chronological age. Leveraging existing ambulatory cognitive...

Mutation rate is a fundamental parameter in population genetics. Apart from being an important scaling parameter for demographic and phylogenetic inference, it allows one to understand at what rate new genetic diversity is generated and what is the expected level of genetic diversity in a population at equilibrium. However, except for well-establis...

Novel opportunities to examine how life experiences connect to health and mortality through biological aging have increased due to the affordability of genomic analysis. Although epidemiological studies suggest associations between stress and accelerated biological aging, most if not all measures in the past have been global, data cross-sectional,...

Anadromous river herring (alewife and blueback herring) persist at historically low abundances and are caught as bycatch in commercial fisheries, potentially preventing recovery despite conservation efforts. We used newly established single-nucleotide polymorphism genetic baselines for alewife and blueback herring to define fine-scale reporting gro...

The Threespine Stickleback is ancestrally a marine fish, but many marine populations breed in fresh water (i.e., are anadromous), facilitating their colonization of isolated freshwater habitats a few years after they form. Repeated adaptation to fresh water during at least 10 million years and continuing today has led to Threespine Stickleback beco...

Natural selection shapes the evolution of antipredator traits in prey. However, selection in the wild depends on ecological context, including features of predator and prey populations, making field studies of selection critical to understanding how predators shape selection on prey defences. Threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) is a cla...

Similar forms often evolve repeatedly in nature, raising long-standing questions about the underlying mechanisms. Here, we use repeated evolution in stickleback to identify a large set of genomic loci that change recurrently during colonization of freshwater habitats by marine fish. The same loci used repeatedly in extant populations also show rapi...

The repeated adaptation of oceanic threespine sticklebacks to fresh water has made it a premier organism to study parallel evolution. These small fish have multiple distinct ecotypes that display a wide range of diverse phenotypic traits. Ecotypes are easily crossed in the laboratory, and families are large and develop quickly enough for quantitati...

Similar forms often evolve repeatedly in nature, raising longstanding questions about the underlying mechanisms. Here we use repeated evolution in sticklebacks to identify a large set of genomic loci that change recurrently during colonization of new freshwater habitats by marine fish. The same loci used repeatedly in extant populations also show r...

Trait variation among populations is important for shaping ecological dynamics. In marine intertidal systems, seawater temperature, low tide emersion temperature, and pH can drive variation in traits and affect species interactions. In western North America, Nucella dogwhelks are intertidal drilling predators of the habitat-forming mussel Mytilus c...

Secondary contact may have important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes; however, few studies have tracked the outcomes of secondary contact from its onset in natural ecosystems. We evaluated an anadromous alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) reintroduction project in Rogers Lake (Connecticut, USA), which contains a landlocked alewife...

Anthropogenic activities are placing increasing pressure on many species, particularly those that rely on more than one ecosystem. River herring (alewife, Alosa pseudoharengus and blueback herring, A. aestivalis collectively) are anadromous fishes that reproduce in rivers and streams of eastern North America and migrate to the western Atlantic Ocea...

Spirocerca lupi is a parasitic nematode of canids and occurs in most tropical and subtropical regions around the world. While its life cycle is well known, insight is lacking about its mating structure within-hosts, genetic variability and long-distance dispersal ability. These characteristics contribute significantly to the dynamics and spread of...

Freshwater habitat alteration and marine fisheries can affect anadromous fish species, and populations fluctuating in size elicit conservation concern and coordinated management. We describe the development and characterization of two sets of 96 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assays for two species of anadromous alosine fishes, alewife and bl...

White steenbras Lithognathus lithognathus (Teleostei: Sparidae) is an overexploited marine fish species endemic to South Africa. Overexploitation in recreational, subsistence and commercial fisheries has resulted in stock collapse and the need for improved management of the species. Adults are thought to undertake large-scale annual spawning migrat...

The combination of oceanographic barriers and habitat heterogeneity are known to reduce connectivity and leave specific genetic signatures in the demographic history of marine species. However, barriers to gene flow in the marine environment are almost never impermeable which inevitably allows secondary contact to occur. In this study, eight sampli...

Due to their geographic isolation, biotas of oceanic islands are likely influenced by episodic long distance dispersal events, but such observations are scarce. In June 2012, fishermen from Réunion Island caught an unknown specimen of grouper, identified as dusky grouper Epinephelus marginatus (Lowe, 1834). This was highly unexpected considering th...

Book of abstract international conference ICAWA 2014 : the AWA project : ecosystem approach to the management of fisheries and the marine environment in West African waters Source Dakar : SRFC/CSRP ; IRD, 2015, p. 49. p. 49 ISBN 9782955360201 Colloque International Conference AWA (ICAWA), 1., Dakar (SEN), 2014/12/09-11 Plan de classement 040 Descr....

Recently, 454 sequencing has emerged as a popular method for isolating microsatellites owing to cost-effectiveness and time saving. In this study, repeat-enriched libraries from two southern African endemic sparids (Pachymetopon blochii and Lithognathus lithognathus) were 454 GS-FLX sequenced. From these, 7370 sequences containing repeats (SCRs) we...