Hello and Welcome!

Hello everybody and welcome to my blog – Alice’s Arms Race!

Essentially, this blog explores recent literature and controversy in evolutionary ecology. Evolutionary ecology considers how interactions (both among species and between species and their environment) shape species through adaptation and selection, as well as the consequences of the resulting evolutionary change. This field of science is broadly where my interests lie. As unrealistic as this example is, see below a clip from Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder. This depicts, in a very basic way, my main interest in evolutionary ecology – evolutionary arms races.

This process can be described as the struggle between co-evolving genes/species/traits that results in the development of adaptations and the appropriate counter-adaptations. Studies have used this phenomenon to explain various interactions on Earth, such as the development of antibiotic resistance, the evolution of sex and the development of predator-prey systems. It is an incredible battle that can be witnessed throughout evolutionary time! This evolutionary hypothesis is commonly referred to as the Red Queen Effect (hence the logo), which is based on Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll:

• ‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
• ‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

I began writing this blog in my masters year of my MSci Zoology degree at the University of Nottingham. At the beginning of each month, I aim to publish a new post discussing a new scientific paper, a topic of controversy, recent news or any other ecology/evolution-related subjects that I find particularly interesting. Additionally, I will include the details of my final year project, which involves mapping the mimetic accuracy of hoverflies onto their phylogenetic tree – a task no one in the scientific community has achieved yet! This exciting opportunity is currently involving background reading and writing my project proposal, but after Christmas I will begin collecting data.

Thank you for visiting my blog site and I hope that you find much more interesting content in the months to come. Don’t forget to follow for updates and leave comments for feedback!