… We also found that root prior in MCMCTree has massive impact on the timing of ant diversification, something to keep in mind. There are other tidbits in there, but we hope the narrative is clear and that the myrmecological community finds the new trees useful!
… 1) some areas of a large tree like this are likely affected by different biases and 2) currently there isn’t a good way to integrate uncertainties from very different approaches to phylogeny, for example from coalescent and concatenated analyses…
… Instead of selecting one preferred tree, to deal with this we identified several likely decent ones, and combined bootstrap trees from those into a consensus. This is not a perfect solution, but we went for it because…
This is worrisome, because inference on simulated data with known parameters is the best case scenario, it should be easy and not biased. We also ran many empirical analyses and for several nodes different treatments produce highly supported but contradictory...
We wanted to see how much data one would need to resolve the most difficult nodes in the ant phylogeny. We simulated alignments as closely approximating empirical data and found that you need many hundreds of genes for some relationships.
We’ve got a new phylogeny of the ants out as a preprint! It’s been an exciting collaboration with some awesome 🐜 people for the past few years, led by Marek Borowiec and @corriemoreau.bsky.socialwww.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Our study on the cophylogenetic interactions between oak gall wasps and their parasitoids in Hungary, using a Bayesian mixed modelling framework is now available as a preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Congrats! I'm glad you are able to find a new position that will hopefully suit you better :)
Would you like to work in our group? We have a 16 month postdoc position on recombination landscape variation in wild vertebrates (lots of data ready and waiting). Please DM or email Susan.Johnston@ed.ac.uk - I'm happy to chat. Deadline 22nd July. elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
We are hiring! Two RA positions at NHM London and a postdoc at University of Sheffield as part of a grant on convergent evolution. We strongly encourage diverse applicants to apply. Feel free to email me or Gavin Thomas for more details or if you have any questions 1/3