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Co-presented by Indian Summer Festival and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Lucy Hyslop, Charles Montgomery, John Helliwell and Victor Chan discuss the 'Happy City' at Indian Summer Festival.

Episode 18 features Baljit Sangra, a Vancouver-based documentarian and filmmaker. Baljit's latest documentary, "Because We Are Girls", is a powerful film that follows three Indo-Canadian sisters from Williams Lake, BC, who experienced sexual abuse by an older relative in their childhood years. Through an empathetic lens, Baljit shows the sisters’ laughs and struggles, as they seek to break the cycle of abuse and redress the wrongs within their family. Am Johal and Maria Cecilia Saba talk to Baljit about her approach to a complex story in a way that highlights her heroines’ humanity and the power of true sisterhood. Read more about "Because We Are Girls" here: vivamantra.ca/

There is currently conflict in the literature on the taxonomic status of the reportedly cosmopolitan species Neosiphonia harveyi, a common red alga along the coast of Atlantic Canada and New England, USA. Neosiphonia harveyi sensu lato was assessed using three molecular markers: COI-5P, ITS and rbcL. All three markers clearly delimited three genetic species groups within N. harveyi sensu lato in this region, which we identified as N. harveyi, N. japonica and Polysiphonia akkeshiensis (here resurrected from synonymy with N. japonica). Although Neosiphonia harveyi is considered by some authors to be introduced to the Atlantic from the western Pacific, it was only confirmed from the North Atlantic suggesting it is native to this area. In contrast, Neosiphonia japonica was collected from only two sites in Rhode Island, USA, as well as from its reported native range in Asia (South Korea), which when combined with data in GenBank indicates that this species was introduced to the Northwest Atlantic. The GenBank data further indicate that N. japonica was also introduced to North Carolina, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. Despite the fact that all three markers clearly delimited N. harveyi and N. japonica as distinct genetic species groups, the ITS sequences for some N. harveyi individuals displayed mixed patterns and additivity indicating introgression of nuclear DNA from N. japonica into N. harveyi in the Northwest Atlantic. Introgression of DNA from an introduced species to a native species (i.e. “genetic pollution”) is one of the possible consequences of species introductions, and we believe this is the first documented evidence for this phenomenon in red algae. ITS sequence alignmentAn alignment of ITS sequences that were used to create a neighbor-joining tree for Figure 1COI-5P sequence alignmentAn alignment of COI-5P sequences that were used to create a neighbor-joining tree for Figure 1rbcL sequence alignmentAn alignment of rbcL sequences that were used to create a neighbor-joining tree for Figure 3Figure 3 rbcL treeA neighbor-joining tree generated from rbcL sequence dataFigure 1 COI-5P treeA neighbor-joining tree generated from COI-5P sequence dataFigure 1 ITS treeA neighbor-joining tree generated from ITS sequence data

The physiological mechanisms underlying local adaptation in natural populations of animals, and whether the same mechanisms contribute to adaptation and acclimation, are largely unknown. Therefore, we tested for evolutionary divergence in aerobic exercise physiology in laboratory bred, size-matched crosses of ancestral, benthic, normal Lake Whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) and derived, limnetic, more actively-swimming ‘dwarf’ ecotypes. We acclimated fish to constant swimming (emulating limnetic foraging) and control conditions (emulating normal activity levels) to simultaneously study phenotypic plasticity. We found extensive divergence between ecotypes: dwarf fish generally had constitutively higher values of traits related to oxygen transport (ventricle size) and use by skeletal muscle (percent oxidative muscle, mitochondrial content), and also evolved differential plasticity of mitochondrial function (Complex I activity and flux through Complexes I-IV and IV). The effects of swim-training were less pronounced than differences among ecotypes and the traits which had a significant training effect (ventricle protein content, ventricle MDH activity and muscle Complex V activity) did not differ among ecotypes. Only one trait, ventricle mass, varied in a similar manner with acclimation and adaptation and followed a pattern consistent with genetic accommodation. Overall, the physiological and biochemical mechanisms underlying acclimation and adaptation to swimming activity in Lake Whitefish generally differ. R code for nested, two-way ANOVAsR code for nested, two-way ANOVAs (example for Fig. 1A)Figs1-6_MixedEffectsModel_Code.RR_Code_for_DFAR_Code_for_DFA (Fig. 7)Fig7_DFA_Code.RFig1A_HematocritData for Figure 1AFig1B_VentricleMassData for Figure 1BFig2_HeartEnzymesData for Figure 2Fig3A_PercentRMData for Figure 3AFig3C,E_CapillaryDensityData for Figure 3C,EFig4_MuscleEnzymesData for Figure 4Fig5_MitoRespirationData for Figure 5Fig6_ETCenzymesData for Figure 6Fig7_DF(tank_means)Data for Figure 7 - tank means for all significant variables

View of north end from the east side during construction.

The performance of courtship signals provides information about the behavioural state and quality of the signaller, and females can use such information for social decision-making (e.g. mate choice). However, relatively little is known about the degree to which the perception of and preference for differences in motor performance are shaped by developmental experiences. Furthermore, the neural substrates that development could act upon to influence the processing of performance features remains largely unknown. In songbirds, females use song to identify males and select mates. Moreover, female songbirds are often sensitive to variation in male song performance. Consequently, we investigated how developmental exposure to adult male song affected behavioural and neural responses to song in a small, gregarious songbird, the zebra finch. Zebra finch males modulate their song performance when courting females, and previous work has shown that females prefer the high-performance, female-directed courtship song. However, unlike females allowed to hear and interact with an adult male during development, females reared without developmental song exposure did not demonstrate behavioural preferences for high-performance courtship songs. Additionally, auditory responses to courtship and non-courtship song were altered in adult females raised without developmental song exposure. These data highlight the critical role of developmental auditory experience in shaping the perception and processing of song performance. EGR1_dataNumber of EGR1 neurons/mm2 in the NCM, CMM and IC.preference_score_by_maleIDAverage preference scores of all females tested on each male stimulus.preference_scores_all_femalesraw data for call back preference tests for normally-reared and song-naive females tested on stimuli from different malespreference_score_vs_song_measuresPercent difference for measures of song between courtship and non-courtship singing. Measures include the number of introductory notes and motifs, syllable entropy, CV of the fundamental frequency and song tempo (motif duration).

We analyzed individual variation in work load (nest visit rate) during chick-rearing, and the consequences of this variation in terms of breeding productivity, in a highly synchronous breeder, the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) focusing on female birds. There was marked (10- to 16-fold) variation in total, female and male nest visit rates, among individuals, but individual variation in female nest visit rate was independent of environment (rainfall, temperature) and metrics of individual quality (laying date, clutch size, amount of male provisioning help), and was only weakly associated with chick demand (i.e., day 6 brood size). Female nest visit rate was independent of date and experimentally delayed birds provisioned at the same rate as peak-nesting birds; supporting a lack of effect of date per se. Brood size at fledging was positively but weakly related to total nest visit rate (male + female), with >fivefold variation in nest visit rate for any given brood size, and in females brood size at fledging and chick mass at fledging were independent of female nest visit rate, that is, individual variation in workload was not associated with higher productivity. Nevertheless, nest visit rate in females was repeatable among consecutive days (6–8 posthatching), and between peak (first) and second broods, but not among years. Our data suggest that individual females behave as if committed to a certain level of parental care at the outset of their annual breeding attempt, but this varies among years, that is, behavior is not fixed throughout an individual's life but represents an annually variable decision. We suggest females are making predictable decisions about their workload during provisioning that maximizes their overall fitness based on an integration of information on their current environment (although these cues currently remain unidentified). European Starling Provisioning DataNest visit rates, individual identifying bands,environmental data and reproductive success in European starlings. See ReadMe file for further description.Fowler_Williams_EUST data.csv

Many understory birds and other groups form genetically differentiated subspecies or closely related species on opposite sides of major rivers of Amazonia, but are proposed to come into geographic contact in headwater regions where narrower river widths may present less of a dispersal barrier. Whether such forms hybridize in headwater regions is generally unknown, but has important implications to our understanding of the role of rivers as drivers of speciation. We used a dataset of several thousand SNPs to show that seven taxon pairs which differentiate across a major Amazonian river come into geographic contact and hybridize in headwater regions. All taxon pairs possessed hybrids with low numbers of loci in which alleles were inherited from both parental species, suggesting they are backcrossed with parentals, and indicating gene flow between parental populations. Ongoing gene flow challenges rivers as the sole cause of in situ speciation, but is compatible with the view that the wide river courses in the heart of Amazonia may have driven interfluvial divergence during episodes of wet forest retraction away from headwater regions. Taxa as old as 4 Ma in our Amazonian dataset continue to hybridize at contact zones, suggesting reproductive isolation evolves at a slow pace. SNP_dataset_for_DryadSNP data