Publications by authors named "Debra Pires"

The 2019 Undergraduate Biology Education Research Gordon Research Conference (UBER GRC), titled "Achieving Widespread Improvement in Undergraduate Education," brought together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners working to identify, promote, and understand widespread adoption of evidence-based teaching, learning, and success strategies in undergraduate biology. Graduate students and postdocs had the additional opportunity to present and discuss research during a Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) that preceded the GRC. This report provides a broad overview of the UBER GRC and GRS and highlights major themes that cut across invited talks, poster presentations, and informal discussions.

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The spectacular social courtship displays of lekking birds are thought to evolve via sexual selection, but this view does not easily explain the participation of many males that apparently fail to mate. One of several proposed solutions to this 'lek skew paradox' is that kin selection favours low-ranking males joining leks to increase the fitness of closely related breeders. We investigated the potential for kin selection to operate in leks of the greater sage grouse, Centrocercus urophasianus, by estimating relatedness between lekking males using microsatellite DNA markers.

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