Blackcap migration - adaptation in time and space
Institute Seminar by Miriam Liedvogel
- Date: Jul 15, 2025
- Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Miriam Liedvogel
- Miriam Liedvogel is Director of the Institute of Avian Research “Vogelwarte Helgoland” and Professor of Ornithology at Carl-von-Ossietzky University Oldenburg. She is fascinated by the phenomenon of bird migration and with her research asks, how this fascinating behaviour is controlled, coordinated and regulated on the molecular level? To address this question, she links careful behavioural observation and state-of-the-art tracking migration in the wild to carefully characterise migratory behaviour under controlled conditions as well as free flying birds, with whole genome sequencing and gene expression approaches to match genotype to phenotype. Her work is funded through the European Commission (Marie Curie Fellowship), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Feodor Lynen Fellowship), the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Max Planck Society (MPG). Miriam has been awarded various prices and fellowships, e.g. an award for outstanding supervision by the Universitätsgesellschaft Oldenburg (UGO), the JED Williams Medal for her committee work. Besides regularly talking at both national and international scientific conferences, Miriam enjoys to communicate science to children and the general public.
- Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
- Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
- Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
- Contact: aflack@ab.mpg.de
Understanding the genetics of bird migration is a long-standing goal in evolutionary biology. Blackcaps Sylvia atricapilla are ideal for this work as different populations exhibit enormous difference in migratory behaviour and little else. We characterize (i) phenotype, population structure and demographic history the blackcap, and (ii) identify sequence variants and signaling pathways that are associated with variation of the migratory phenotype. My talk will cover insight from classical studies on selection and cross-breeding experiments, ring recovery data, tracking approaches in the wild, to finally introducing novel insight from using a de novo assembled genome of the blackcap as reference for large scale demographic study with different phenotypes across their breeding range.
The MPI-AB Seminar Series is open to members of MPI and Uni Konstanz. The zoom link is published each week in the MPI-AB newsletter.