We have posted a video at the BOC YouTube channel of a talk presented by Dr Julia Day, an Associate Professor at University College London who has developed a research programme in research in Systematics and Evolutionary Biology. Much of her work focuses on African freshwater fish as a study system, but she’s interested in other African radiations too.
Being a birder, she couldn’t resist working on a notoriously difficult-to-identify avian group. Julia gave a talk entitled Continental vs. island evolution of a ‘great speciator’: resolving the Zosterops taxonomic conundrum.
There have been few studies that focus on species-rich groups of highly dispersive animals which can colonise both continents and extensive archipelagos over comparable timeframes. White-eyes (Zosterops) has been lauded as a ‘great speciator’.
In her talk, Julia discussed how resolving the evolutionary relationships of white-eyes (Zosterops) in Africa, Arabia and associated islands, combined with morphological data, has allowed us to better understand evolutionary processes across these different geographic landscapes.