Departmental Seminar

Abstract:

Evolution’s oddballs often provide powerful opportunities to tackle long‑standing questions in evolutionary biology. My research investigates the evolutionary causes and consequences of unconventional reproductive strategies. In this talk, I will examine the repeatability of evolution and the co‑evolutionary dynamics between sexual hosts and asexual parasites in the iconic Amazon molly system. I will also explore how divergent reproductive strategies in killifishes reshape species interactions and might drive convergent molecular evolution. Together, these systems illustrate how unconventional reproductive modes can influence ecological interactions and redirect evolutionary pathways.

Biography: 

Dr. Waldir Miron Berbel-Filho is an evolutionary biologist interested in the processes that generate biodiversity, from molecular mechanisms of phenotypic variation to the evolutionary history of populations and species. He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, including a period as a visiting researcher at Dalhousie University in Canada. He completed his Ph.D. at Swansea University, investigating how clonal mangrove killifish cope with environmental variability through interactions between genetic and epigenetic variation. He later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma, focusing on reproductive biology and multigenerational phenotypic plasticity in fishes. Waldir is now a faculty member at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. His lab explores questions at the intersection of evolutionary biology, reproduction, and genomics.