
Michael SorensonBoston University | BU · Department of Biology
Michael Sorenson
PhD, University of Minnesota
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137
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 2010 - December 2015
July 2004 - June 2010
January 2005 - May 2005
Publications
Publications (137)
Recent genomic analyses of evolutionary radiations suggest that ancestral or standing genetic variation may facilitate rapid diversification, particularly in cases involving convergence in ecological traits. Likewise, lateral transfer of alleles via hybridization may also facilitate adaptive convergence, but little is known about the role of ancest...
A growing variety of “genotype-by-sequencing” (GBS) methods use restriction enzymes and high throughput DNA sequencing to generate data for a subset of genomic loci, allowing the simultaneous discovery and genotyping of thousands of polymorphisms in a set of multiplexed samples. We evaluated a “double-digest” restriction-site associated DNA sequenc...
A growing body of empirical and theoretical work supports the plausibility of sympatric speciation, but there remain few examples in which all the essential components of the process are well understood. The African indigobirds Vidua spp. are host-specific brood parasites. Indigobird nestlings are reared along with host young, and mimic the mouth m...
Parasites that exploit multiple hosts often experience diversifying selection for host-specific adaptations. This can result in multiple strains of host specialists coexisting within a single parasitic species. A long-standing conundrum is how such sympatric host races can be maintained within a single parasitic species in the face of interbreeding...
Chromosomal inversions are structural mutations that can play a prominent role in adaptation and speciation. Inversions segregating across species boundaries (trans-species inversions) are often taken as evidence for ancient balancing selection or adaptive introgression, but can also be due to incomplete lineage sorting. Using whole-genome resequen...
Migration schedules and the timing of other annual events (e.g., pair formation and molt) can affect the distribution of genetic diversity as much as where these events occur. The greater white-fronted goose (Anser albifrons) is a circumpolar goose species, exhibiting temporal and spatial variation of events among populations during the annual cycl...
Occurring independently at seven separate origins across the avian tree of life, obligate brood parasitism is a unique suite of traits observed in only approximately 1% of all bird species. Obligate brood parasites exhibit varied physiological, morphological, and behavioural traits across lineages, but common among all obligate brood parasites is t...
Significance
Validating an almost century-old hypothesis, we show that a critical host-specific adaptation in a brood-parasitic bird, mimicry of host egg coloration, is maternally inherited, allowing mothers to transmit specialized mimicry to their daughters irrespective of the father’s host species. This genetic architecture, however, is a double-...
Indigobirds (Vidua spp.) are obligate brood parasites in which imprinting on heterospecific hosts shapes adult vocal behavior and mating preferences. Adult male indigobirds mimic the songs and other vocalizations of their respective hosts, which signals their own host environment to prospective mates and has important implications for speciation. I...
Understanding how risk factors affect populations across their annual cycle is a major challenge for conserving migratory birds. For example, disease outbreaks may happen on the breeding grounds, the wintering grounds, or during migration, and are expected to accelerate under climate change. The ability to identify the geographic origins of impacte...
Islands are separated by natural barriers that prevent gene flow between terrestrial populations and promote allopatric diversification. Birds in the South Pacific are an excellent model to explore the interplay between isolation and gene flow due to the region’s numerous archipelagos and well-characterized avian communities. The wattled honeyeater...
Delineating conservation units is a complex and often controversial process that is particularly challenging for highly vagile species. Here, we reassess population genetic structure and identify those populations of highest conservation value in the threatened snowy plover (Charadrius nivosus, Cassin, 1858), a partial migrant shorebird endemic to...
Interspecific hybridization is recognized as an important process in the evolutionary dynamics of both speciation and the reversal of speciation. However, our understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of hybridization that erode versus promote species boundaries is incomplete. The endangered, endemic koloa maoli (or Hawaiian duck, Anas wyv...
This study evaluates phylogeographic structure in selected forest bird species distributed on either side of the Dahomey Gap in West Africa to extend analyses of avian diversification across the Guineo-Congolean forest. Mitochondrial DNA sequence data were collected for five species, including four with a break in distribution across the Dahomey Ga...
Recently evolved species typically share genetic variation across their genomes due to incomplete lineage sorting and/or ongoing gene flow. Given only subtle allele frequency differences at most loci and the expectation that divergent selection may affect only a tiny fraction of the genome, distinguishing closely related species based on multi‐locu...
The West Indian avifauna has provided fundamental insights into island biogeography, taxon cycles, and the evolution of avian behavior. Our interpretations, however, rely on robust hypotheses of evolutionary relationships and consistent conclusions about taxonomic status in groups with many endemic island populations. Here we present a phylogenetic...
Sexual traits (e.g., visual ornaments, acoustic signals, courtship behaviour) are often displayed together as multi-modal signals. Some hypotheses predict joint evolution of different sexual signals (e.g., to increase the efficiency of communication), or that different signals trade-off with each other (e.g., due to limited resources). Alternativel...
Although sexual ornamentation mediates reproductive isolation, comparative evidence does not support the hypothesis that stronger sexual selection promotes speciation. Prior analyses have neglected the possibility that decreases in ornamentation may also promote speciation, such that both increases and decreases in the strength of sexual selection...
Maternal inheritance via the female-specific W chromosome was long ago proposed as a potential solution to the evolutionary enigma of co-existing host-specific races (or 'gentes') in avian brood parasites. Here we report the first unambiguous evidence for maternal inheritance of egg colouration in the brood-parasitic common cuckoo Cuculus canorus....
Supplementary Figures 1-2, Supplementary Tables 1-10 and Supplementary References
Background
Studies of non-model species are important for understanding the molecular processes underpinning phenotypic variation under natural ecological conditions. The common buzzard (Buteo buteo; Aves: Accipitriformes) is a widespread and common Eurasian raptor with three distinct plumage morphs that differ in several fitness-related traits, in...
Landscape complexity influences patterns of animal dispersal, which in turn may affect both gene flow and the spread of pathogens. White-nose syndrome (WNS) is an introduced fungal disease that has spread rapidly throughout eastern North America, causing massive mortality in bat populations. We tested for a relationship between the population genet...
Speciation is a continuous and dynamic process, and studying organisms during the early stages of this process can aid in identifying speciation mechanisms. The mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and Mexican duck (A. [p.] diazi) are two recently diverged taxa with a history of hybridization and controversial taxonomy. To understand their evolutionary his...
Rapid diversification is often associated with morphological or ecological adaptations that allow organisms to radiate into novel niches. Neotropical Adelpha butterflies, which comprise over 200 species and subspecies, are characterized by extraordinary breadth in host plant use and wing color patterns compared to their closest relatives. To examin...
Obligate brood parasites, which typically lack reliable interactions with conspecifics early in life, acquire species recognition cues by mechanisms other than imprinting on parents and siblings. The African indigobirds (Vidua spp.) are exceptional among brood parasites in that learning and mimicry of host vocalizations play an integral role in the...
This edited volume is provides an authoritative synthesis of knowledge about the history of life. All the major groups of organisms are treated, by the leading workers in their fields. With sections on: The Importance of Knowing the Tree of Life; The Origin and Radiation of Life on Earth; The Relationships of Green Plants; The Relationships of Fung...
We conducted a multi-year study to track the diurnal and seasonal movements of wintering Long-tailed Duck (LTDU) in the waters around Nantucket, and as they migrate between their wintering areas and their breeding areas using satellite telemetry. Our primary objectives were to obtain data on nighttime locations of instrumented LTDUs in the Sound an...
We used mtDNA sequence data and sequence data from a panel of nine nuclear HapSTR loci to test for genetic differentiation among eastern and western long-tailed duck (Clangula hyemalis) populations and to assess whether the eastern wintering population (sampled in Nantucket Sound) comprised genetically differentiated breeding populations.
HapSTRs combine information from a microsatellite (or simple tandem repeat, STR) with one or more single nucleotide polymorphisms in the DNA sequence immediately flanking the STR. These loci may offer increased power for the estimation of demographic parameters, but also present some challenges for data collection and analysis. We describe a proces...
Rohwer and Freeman (F. C. Rohwer and S. Freeman. 1989. Can. J. Zool. 67: 239–253) have suggested that conspecific nest parasitism is rare in species with parentally fed young because high costs to hosts result in strong selection for defenses against parasitism. In contrast, conspecific nest parasitism is frequent in waterfowl and other species wit...
One of the most widely distributed bats in the New World, the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) exhibits well-documented geographic variation in morphology and life history traits, suggesting the potential for significant phylogeographic structure as well as adaptive differentiation among populations. In a pattern broadly consistent with morphologic...
Natural hybrid zones provide opportunities to study a range of evolutionary phenomena from speciation to the genetic basis of fitness-related traits. We show that widespread hybridization has occurred between two neo-tropical stream fishes with partial reproductive isolation. Phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial sequence data showed that the swor...
Ants of the genus Pheidole are abundant and hyperdiverse, particularly in Neotropical rainforests. Very little is known, however, about the degree of
ecological and behavioral differentiation of coexisting species comprising Pheidole communities. Additionally, the ecological role of the major worker subcaste, thought to be significant to the divers...
Two species of waterfowl living at high altitude provide a prominent example of parallel adaptation at the molecular level. The bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) breeds at high elevations in central Asia and migrates across the Himalayas, where the partial pressure of oxygen (O(2)) is one-third of sea level. In South America, the distantly related A...
Sexual reproduction relies on the recognition of conspecifics for breeding. Most experiments in birds have implicated a critical role for early social learning in directing subsequent courtship behaviours and mating decisions. This classical view of avian sexual imprinting is challenged, however, by studies of megapodes and obligate brood parasites...
We studied the phylogenetic relationships of four duck genera endemic to South America: Brazilian teal Amazonetta brasiliensis, spectacled duck Speculanas specularis, crested duck Lophonetta specularioides, and four species of steamer ducks Tachyerespatachonicus, T. leucocephalus, T. pteneres, T. brachypterus. Genetic divergence within and among sp...
Theory predicts that parallel evolution should be common when the number of beneficial mutations is limited by selective constraints on protein structure. However, confirmation is scarce in natural populations. Here we studied the major haemoglobin genes of eight Andean duck lineages and compared them to 115 other waterfowl species, including the b...
Why some lineages have diversified into larger numbers of species than others is a fundamental but still relatively poorly understood aspect of the evolutionary process. Coevolution has been recognized as a potentially important engine of speciation, but has rarely been tested in a comparative framework. We use a comparative approach based on a com...
We determined the systematic relationships and approximate divergence time of Bannerman’s Turaco Tauraco bannermani and used this information to test whether the origin and distribution of this species and its closest relatives are associated with the effects of historical climate change on forest habitats in West Africa. We collected mitochondrial...
Le matériel extrait de la paroi intérieure des coquilles de neuf oeufs présumés provenir de Camptorhynchus labradorius a été soumis à l'extraction d'ADN et à l'amplification en chaîne par polymérase (PCR). Pour chacun des oeufs, des séquences partielles d'un à trois gènes mitochondriaux (12S, ND2 et région de contrôle) ont été comparées avec des sé...
Population genetic variation in Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos; n = 152) from Western Russia, North Asia, the Aleutian Islands, and mainland Alaska was investigated using 667 base pairs of the 5′-end of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region. DNA sequencing revealed two clades that correspond to Avise et al.’s (1990) group A and B mtDNA haploty...
Se observaron machos híbridos del género Vidua en el campo y se grabaron sus vocalizaciones para documentar la imitación del canto de su hospedero. También se secuenció el ADN mitocondrial (ADNmt) de uno de los machos para identificar a la especie madre. Los machos híbridos imitaron el canto de la especie Pytilia melba, el hospedero usual de Vidua...
Nuclear sequence data, often from multiple loci, are increasingly being employed in analyses of population structure and history, yet there has been relatively little evaluation of methods for accurately and efficiently separating the alleles or haplotypes in heterozygous individuals. We compared the performance of a computational method of haploty...
The White-headed Duck is a globally threatened species historically recorded from Spain in the west to China in the east. It has suffered major population declines, local extinctions and range fragmentation. Several projects have attempted to reintroduce captive-bred birds into parts of the former range in Europe, but with little success. Two capti...
Behavioural and molecular studies suggest that brood parasitic indigobirds (Vidua spp.) rapidly diversified through a process of speciation by host shift. However, behavioural imprinting on host song, the key mechanism promoting speciation in this system, may also lead to hybridization and gene flow among established indigobird species when and if...
The African wattle-eyes (genera Platysteira and Dyaphorophyia) comprise 10 species endemic to Africa. We analyzed both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequence data to test the monophyly of this group and its two genera, provide a preliminary assessment of species limits, and gain insight into the phylogeographic history of the wattle-eye radiation....
Dataset Legend. Description of variables (column headings) given in Additional file 1. This file also contains descriptions of some variables NOT included in Additional file 1. Those interested in those variables not included in file 1 should contact the authors.
Dataset. Entire dataset used for analysis in this manuscript and some additional variables
Details of Model 2 from Table 4– BMI. Full statistical model of model 2 from table 4. Dependent variable is BMI.
Details of Model 11 from Table 4– FFM. Full statistical model of model 11 from table 4. Dependent variable is FFM.
Minor alleles of the human dopamine receptor polymorphisms, DRD2/TaqI A and DRD4/48 bp, are related to decreased functioning and/or numbers of their respective receptors and have been shown to be correlated with body mass, height and food craving. In addition, the 7R minor allele of the DRD4 gene is at a higher frequency in nomadic compared to sede...
Determining an absolute timescale for avian evolutionary history has proven contentious. The two sources of information available, paleontological data and inference from extant molecular genetic sequences (colloquially, 'rocks' and 'clocks'), have appeared irreconcilable; the fossil record supports a Cenozoic origin for most modern lineages, where...
Supplemental table S1 GenBank accession numbers. Accession number information for analyzed sequence data (sequences EU166921–EU167086, EU372666–EU372688, and EU391159 are novel to this study).
Supplemental figure S1 Constraint tree. A consensus tree derived from the thick branches only of Figure 27.10 of Cracraft et al. [53] used as a backbone constraint in RAxML tree searches.
To determine the population variation in the androgen receptor (AR) and its association with body composition in a subsistence population, we sampled 87 settled and 65 nomadic males ages 20+ among the Ariaal of northern Kenya. Anthropometric measures included height, body mass index, fat-free mass (FFM), upper arm muscle plus bone area (AMPBA), % b...
Conservation genetic studies often employ DNA extracts from museum specimens for compari-sons with extant populations to monitor temporal changes in genetic diversity. Here, we report on artifact base changes in mitochondrial DNA sequences amplified from relatively recent (£ 35 years) museum specimens of indigobirds (Vidua spp.). Single base errors...
Material extracted from inside the shells of nine purported Labrador Duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius) eggs was subjected to DNA extraction and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. For each egg, partial sequences of one to three mitochondrial genes (12S, ND2, and control region) were compared with sequences derived from a Labrador Duck sp...
Molecular phylogeny of waterfowl species used in the comparative analysis. Bayesian posterior probabilities (PP) are indicated in red for those nodes with less than 100% PP.
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Length (cm) and elaboration of waterfowl genitalia.
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Sexual dimorphism is ubiquitous in animals and can result from selection pressure on one or both sexes. Sexual selection has become the predominant explanation for the evolution of sexual dimorphism, with strong selection on size-related mating success in males being the most common situation. The cuckoos (family Cuculidae) provide an exceptional c...
The ruddy duck, Oxyura jamaicensis, was introduced to Great Britain in the mid-20th century and has recently spread to other Western European countries. In Spain, ruddy ducks hybridize with the globally endangered white-headed duck, Oxyura leucocephala. We assessed the effects of hybridization on the Spanish white-headed ducks, which constitute 25%...
Most birds have simple genitalia; males lack external genitalia and females have simple vaginas. However, male waterfowl have a phallus whose length (1.5->40 cm) and morphological elaborations vary among species and are positively correlated with the frequency of forced extra-pair copulations among waterfowl species. Here we report morphological co...
Brood parasitic birds offer a unique opportunity to examine the ecological and evolutionary determinants of host associations in avian feather lice (Phthiraptera). Brood parasitic behaviour effectively eliminates vertical transfer of lice between parasitic parents and offspring at the nest, while at the same time providing an opportunity for lice a...
Question: Given a model of speciation by host shift, how do different marker types and measures of genetic differentiation compare in detecting reproductive isolation between a small, recently founded population and its large source population? Data incorporated: We used empirical data from brood parasitic indigobirds (Vidua spp.) as well as simula...
Native to North America, ruddy ducks Oxyura jamaicensis now occur in 21 countries in the western Palaearctic (including Iceland) and their expanding population threatens the native white-headed duck, Oxyura leucocephala, through hybridization and possibly competition for food and nest sites. We used mitochondrial DNA sequences and nuclear microsate...
Indigobirds (Vidua spp.) are host-specific brood parasites that have diversified in a recent radiation apparently driven by host colonization. Behavioral imprinting of both male and female indigobirds on host song is thought to promote rapid speciation because it results in assortative mating between indigobirds associated with a particular host. W...