Category Archives: News

For the sake of completeness, here is the details of the recent meeting in Sheffield, which was organised by Nicola Nadeau

Programme

Monday 13th June

9.00 registration (with refreshments)

9.20 Welcome and announcements

9.30 Simon Martin (Cambridge) – Species boundaries among Heliconius butterflies reflect the genetic architecture of speciation

9.50 Ana Pinharanda (Cambridge) – The comparative landscape of duplications in Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius cydno

10.10 John Davey (Cambridge) Fine-scale recombination maps show no major inversions between sympatric H. melpomene and H. cydno populations

10.30 Break

11.00 Mónica Arias (Paris) – A computer game to explore the evolution of adaptive variations in mimetic colour patterns

11.20 Violaine Llaurens (Paris) – Polymorphic mimicry as an evolutionary dead-end? Lessons drawn from the genetic architecture of mimetic coloration in Cuckoo finch

11.40 Suzanne Saenko (Paris) – Characterization of the wing colour patterning supergene in Heliconius numata

12.00 Joe Hanly (Cambridge) – Mimicry in the Making: the genetic basis of convergent evolution in Heliconius wing patterns

12.20 Discussion

12.30 Lunch

13.45 Victor Soria-Carrasco (Sheffield) – Genomic dynamics of speciation in Timema stick insects

14.14 Neil Rosser (York) – Reproductive isolation and geography in Heliconius elevatus and Heliconius pardalinus

14.30 Lucie Queste (York) – Characterising Reproductive Barriers Between Three Closely Related Heliconius Butterfly Taxa

14.45 Bruna Cama (York) – Genetic analysis of wing pattern and pheromone composition in two sister species of Heliconius butterflies

15.00 Break

15.30 Thomas Aubier (Montpellier) – Identifying the nature of mimicry among prey with unequal defences

15.50 Érika Castro (Copenhagen) – You are what you eat: cyanogenic glucosides in Heliconius and closely related genera

16.10 Gilbert Smith (Irvine) – Gene duplication and gene expression changes play a role in the evolution of candidate pollen feeding genes in Heliconius butterflies

16.30 Discussion

17.00 Posters and drinks reception

18.00 Barbecue

20.00 Quiz

Tuesday 14th June

9.00 Sujai Kumar and Richard Challis (Edinburgh) – lepbase workshop

10.30 Chris Jiggins (Cambridge) – Earthscape database for Heliconius

10.40 Break

11.10 Mauricio Linares (Rosario) – The Jose Celestino Mutis International Experimental Field Station for Lepidoptera Research

11.20 Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill (Cambridge and Tokyo Institute of Technology) – Coevolution of Heliconius butterflies: evidence and outstanding questions

11.40 Jake Morris (York) – Population genomics of a multi-species mimetic hybrid zone

12.00 Emma Curran (Sheffield) – Comparing parallel clines of a polygenic iridescence trait in mimetic butterflies

12.20 Discussion

12.30 Lunch

13.50 Anja Westram (Sheffield) – The genomic basis of ecotype divergence in Littorina snails

14.20 Mathieu Joron (Montpellier) – Inversion polymorphism changes the rules of speciation in a mimetic butterfly

14.40 Paul Jay (Montpellier) – Supergene evolution favoured by the introgression of an inversion in Heliconius

15.00 Break

15.30 Richard Merrill (Cambridge) – Genetic modularity of mate recognition behaviours and their warning pattern cues

15.50 Stephen Montgomery (UCL) – Brains over beauty: Heliconius neuroecology

16.10 Marianne Elias (Paris) – The Ithomiini: the other mimetic butterflies

16.30 Discussion and closing thoughts

The abstract book is hereAbstract_book

I have started making new range maps for the species pages, using CartoDB. Check out Heliconius cydno:

Heliconius cydno

I will try to add more of these as I have time, so keep an eye on the Biology/Species dropdown menu.

Hi Everyone,
I am pleased to announce that the Heliconius meeting will take place in Sheffield, UK this year, on the 13th and 14th of June. There is more information and a link for registration from this page on my website. As in previous years I hope the meeting will reflect the diverse range of research on these butterflies, including ecology, behaviour and genetics/genomics, and will be a chance for networking and to catch-up on the latest research ideas. Registration is open to anyone with an interest, so please come along!

Nicola

We are pleased to announce the 10th International Heliconius meeting. The meeting is a celebration of research into the origins and evolution of the adaptive radiation within Heliconius and related species. The topics will include genomics, behaviour, mimicry and ecology of Heliconius butterflies.

The meeting will be hosted by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and will take place on July 25-26th in Gamboa, Panama. In addition to research talks and posters, there will be several breakout sessions and workshops.

If you haven’t done so and are are interested in attending the meeting please contact Owen McMillan (mcmillano@si.edu) today. In that e-mail please indicate 1) the dates of your visit, 2) if you are interested in presenting a talk or poster and 3) housing preference [Gamboa Rainforest Resort (posh), shared room in the ridge housing (dorm-like), or a bed in the mostly restored Gamboa School House (camp-like)].

Keith Brown and Larry Gilbert in Gamboa, Panama
At a rough count, we reckon this must be the tenth meeting (The first one I went to was organised by me in Panama, but Bob Srygley assured me that there was an earlier one so we called Panama the second, and since then 2 in Harvard, 2 in Puerto Rico, 1 in Cambridge, 1 in Paris, 1 in Edinburgh)…. so we need to celebrate!

Many of you have already let Owen know that you are coming – if you haven’t done so already please email and let us know. In due course we will post more information about accommodation and take schedules here. We are also giving serious consideration to the social schedule!

Hi all,

We have now fixed the dates for the Heliconius meeting in Panama for the 25/26 July. The plan is to arrive on the 24th and leave on 27th. Of course you are welcome to stay longer, but we cannot provide accommodation so that would then be up to you to organise this with STRI or otherwise. Sorry but there is very little flexibility in dates due to availability of the Schoolhouse where we are going to hold the talks and provide meals, so these are now non-negotiable dates.

The accommodation options are:

1) Dorm style bunks in the Gamboa schoolhouse – cheap shared accommodation
2) Shared apartments on the Ridge – likely to be limited availability but a bit more privacy
3) High end accommodation at the Gamboa Rainforest Resort http://www.gamboaresort.com/default-en.html

Please let Owen know which you would prefer, and whether you are likely to attend the meeting. It also might be helpful if you could also indicate whether you would like to present a talk or poster.

Please note that accommodation gets very full in Gamboa over the summer, so we strongly advise that you organise soon if you would like to spend longer in Gamboa around the meeting.

All the best

Chris

Owen and I would like to propose a Heliconius meeting in Panama later this year. The tentative dates are first week of August – week beginning 3rd August 2015. We can book out the Gamboa Schoolhouse in August which will give us a venue in Gamboa, so we don’t have to deal with traffic going into the City (some of you may remember that last time we took a bus into Tupper).

There is ‘dorm room’ accommodation in the schoolhouse, or high end accommodation in the Gamboa Rainforest Resort, and there may also be some STRI apartments available at that time in Gamboa. We would also try and organise a couple of field trips to see some butterflies around Gamboa and perhaps further afield.

For the moment, it would be helpful if we could just get a consensus on the dates – we are fairly limited in flexibility as the following week (10-14 August) is ESEB in europe, and beforehand I will not be in Gamboa for most of July, but please let me know if you can think of a good reason why these dates are a terrible idea.

I am not sure how many people get this email – so please forward to anyone not on the heliconius mailing list and perhaps get them to sign up.

Hope to see many of you in Panama later this year!

Cheers
Chris