What do evolutionary biologists talk about at their annual conference?

If you're like me and did not make it to Raleigh, NC this past month for the annual Evolution 2014 Conference, well there's good news. I'm jazzed to see there are a plethora of lectures online at their Evolution 2014 YouTube Channel. This meeting is one of the premier venues to share scientific research related to evolutionary biology.

Most talks are short (15 minutes) and you can get a sense of the topic and the speaker in the title of each presentation. Be sure to click the "Load More" button as you scroll to the bottom to load all the seminars. I haven't watched all the ones that I wanted to yet, but Ive saved them to my "Watch Later" bin. Anyone can do this if they have a YouTube Channel (mine is here). I highly recommend starting a professional channel as a venue to store your talks online and disseminate them to the community. Like all forms of social media in science, these tools are taking off and good ways to advance the open access nature of your science across the world, to the few people who may actually care to watch.

As an example, here's a recent talk by senior graduate student in our lab, Lisa Funkhouser-Jones. In her research, the key question is how many animal genes does it take to tame maternally transmitted bacteria (Wolbachia)?