Natalie Hofmeister
Why are starlings so successful?
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My dissertation focuses on an infamous invader, the European (Common) Starling.
I'm currently working on two major projects:
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1: The starling invasion in North America
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Starlings arrived in New York City in 1890-1891, and they've grown to 200 million strong in only ten or so generations. I'm working with Scott Werner and others at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to examine the evolutionary drivers of starling success in the North American invasion. This project uses ddRADseq to look at population structure and local adaptation across North America, and as one might expect, North American starlings show incredibly low diversity and differentiation.
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2: What do starlings share among invasions?
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Around the same time that starlings invaded North America, these pests also arrived in Australia. Given their world-wide success, Lee Ann Rollins (AU), David Clayton (UK), and Scott Werner (US) have led a large team of researchers to build genomic resources for studying Common Starlings in their native range and beyond. I recently joined the team to help analyze the whole genomes that the starling team compiled across all three continents, and it turns out that American and Australian starlings are quite different from one another.
Comparative molecular evolution
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During my Master's, I focused on the evolution of the glucocorticoid receptor in African starlings, and I'm always interested in collaborations to study physiology and molecular evolution in birds and more.
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I'm now working with Lily Twining and others on the molecular evolution of genes involved in fatty acid processing (FADS1 & FADS2). Lily is an expert in nutritional ecology, especially of omega-3 fatty acids, and our collaboration focuses on how birds may have evolved different strategies for converting fatty acids into a usable form based on their different diets.
Conserving shags in Tierra del Fuego
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Imperial shags typically live in the open ocean, but some populations
of these seabirds have colonized freshwater lakes throughout Argentina.
The Fuegian population faces a number of threats, including pressure
from fishermen and from invasive minks.
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In Winter 2016-7, I went to Tierra del Fuego and found that this freshwater population is down to only 4 individuals. Biologists and rangers at the Secretaría de Ambiente continue to work to conserve this population. I had hoped to work on the population genetics and demographic history of Imperial Shags living in freshwater lakes of Patagonia. Instead, I learned how to cope with my first major fieldwork failure.
