We would like to invite you to attend March’s Wageningen Evolution & Ecology Seminar (WEES) and Workshop.
The seminar will take place on Thursday 21st March, 16.00-17.00 in C1005 in Orion. This will be followed by drinks at The Spot and the opportunity to have dinner (at your own expense) with the speaker. Sign up for dinner with Ruth Fawthrop (r.fawthrop@nioo.knaw.nl). The associated workshop will be from 14.00-15.30 in B4014 in Orion. The workshop gives attendees the opportunity to meet the seminar’s speaker and have a discussion about a hot topic in science. Furthermore, BSc and MSc students can get 1 ECTS for attending 2 workshops. Registration is required for this workshop and you can sign up by emailing Ruth Fawthrop (r.fawthrop@nioo.knaw.nl).
This will be a great event so please forward this information to anyone who could be interested!
Seminar: Mate choice, extra-pair paternity and social networks (16.00h in C1005, Orion)
Dr. Julia Schroeder
Senior Lecturer
Imperial College London, UK
Female mate choice is one of the hallmarks of sexual selection. Driven by anisogamy, females are predicted to be the choosier sex, selecting her mates by aiming to maximise the quality of her offspring, while males are predicted to favour quantity over quality. Extra-pair paternity in socially monogamous song birds is a model system where this female choice is put under magnification: females exchange the genetic contribution of the father, but the rest stays the same. This system allows us to test several predictions from sexual selection and beyond. Here I will explore the classical sexual selection hypotheses (good genes, sexy sons), more recent suggestions (pleiotropy hypotheses) and the roles of ageing, opportunity and connectedness in mate choice. I will present data from 25 years of research in our island system of house sparrows.
Workshop: Time management and life-work balance in academia (14.00h in B4014, Orion)
In this workshop we will explore the ongoing issues academics face surrounding time management and life-work balance. We will consider how we define personal productivity and how ecologists and evolutionary biologists can consider their own time management practices.
As an introduction to the workshop, attendees are encouraged to read the following article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00648-x
WEES background & call for new members
WEES is an initiative of PhD students and postdocs at Wageningen University to organize a continuing series of stimulating seminars on contemporary topics in evolution and ecology. For this series we invite researchers from all over the world who have leading roles in their field. We aim to bring together different groups at Wageningen University using a variety of systems, but with a common interest in evolutionary and ecological questions. WEES is funded by graduate schools PE&RC, WIMEK, EPS, VLAG, and WIAS.
Interested in joining the WEES committee and organizing seminars yourself? WEES is looking for new members! We aim for a broad and diverse range in topics and would like to welcome new members to help and include topics not represented yet. If you are curious, send an email to weeswageningen@gmail.com and join one of our meetings.
For more information please visit: www.weeswageningen.nl or follow us on Twitter @weeswageningen