TheCollege of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences will hold its weekly seminar on Wednesday, March 3, from 3:30-4:30 p.m. via Zoom.
The talk will be offered by Kevin Bilyk, who is an assistant professor of biology
at Montclair State University.
Stuck in the cold: Investigating the routes to adaptation and loss using species native
to extreme cold environments
Animals living in freezing environments face strong selective pressure from severe
cold. Many also face a relaxation of selective pressure from reduced thermal variability
in these habitats. Bilyk is interested in using animals from frigid environments to
investigate common themes and varied routes to adaptation and loss. A central model
in this work has been the Antarctic notothenioids, a group of fishes that has evolved
within the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean. In this seminar, he will discuss
how this research has begun to delineate the transcriptional gains and losses that
can result from evolution in an extreme environment, and his ongoing work to expand
this research to a wider group of cold-adapted fauna.