The blog takes too much time off (try to write more often now onwards), so here goes a brief entry for dusting. A few days ago I returned from my first visit to Brazil, where I participated in a symposium on advances phylogeography of neotropical birds in organized by my colleague Alexandre Aleixo as part of the Brazilian Congress of Zoology in the city of Belem. The conference was number 28 of its kind, in Colombia so far is planning the third ...
least I was able to attend conferences that he wanted (and no outside our safe symposium keynote presentations), as all presentations were long and there were many simultaneous sessions, but I had some very interesting issues in discussions. The first was related to the origin of the present river course Amazon. The traditional assumption that geologists have argued Carina Hoorn (who was in our symposium and made a presentation of his new book on Amazon) is that the Amazon as we know it (ie running from west to East) there is a long time, more than 10 million years ago (1 ). By contrast, another group of researchers led by Kenneth Campbell , evidence suggests that ancient Amazon based on misinterpretations and that the river would be much younger, around 2.5 million years ( 2 ). Interestingly, several bird phylogeography analysis presented at the conference Amazon by Aleixo, Camila Ribas and Joel Cracraft show separations between populations on either side of the river, according to analysis based on clock molecular causes date back to about 2 million years. This seems to support the geological setting of Campbell and suggests that the diversification of Amazonian biota could have been much more recent than what has hitherto been believed. Let's see how the debate ends.
The other issue on which I learned quite is the application of new DNA sequencing techniques, a topical issue on which we talked here once, and was recently reviewed with a special issue of the journal Molecular Ecology (see also this assessment on the applications of these techniques to studies in ornithology ). There is still much to learn about this, but the ability to generate almost all the data needed for our project on phylogeography of birds in lowland distributions on both sides of the Andes (our partners Robb Brumfield and John McCormack are working on this) in only one run is pretty exciting. I still can not imagine how will that be and how to analyze the mountain of data that generated this kind of thing, but well, it's time we get on the bus. The other thing that impresses about this is the shrinking price of sequencing: I heard someone say that there are already companies that can sequence a human genome for about $ 2000 in consumables (almost unbelievable considering what it cost the Human Genome Project) ...
At the end of the congress were watching birds at a site called Utinga (in Bethlehem) with Juan Parra, Luciano Naka and Swati Patel. I watched a couple of "lifers", we learned about a messianic church aims for the welfare of animals (chickens are slaughtered when they hear classical music) and survived to the cobras, the Jaguars and the rain, no doubt thanks to the protection we gave local authorities as shown in the photo (sorry it is blurry, but I had to put this where you get a rider that none of us knows who he is).
