The Braun Lab has been pushing forward and projects and papers in the last year, plus doing some exciting traveling. Here is a quick summary of what we’ve been up to:

• In the spring of 2022, Mike traveled to Panama for another field season studying hybrid manakins. This year, he was joined by Peri, Kevin, and recently retired former postdoc Tom Parsons, who helped develop the Manacus hybrid zone system in the early ’90s. This year the team focused on the islands of the Bocas del Toro archipelago.
• In the summer, Kevin and Mike gave talks on manakins and Red Siskins, respectively, at the AOS meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
• In January of 2023, Kevin and Mike traveled to Ecuador to further a collaboration with Dr. Jordan Karubian from Tulane University (lab website here) and PhD student Luke Anderson. Luke will soon be joining us in DC for a semester to tackle a large manakin sequencing project.
• Shauna had her first PhD chapter accepted! More on that soon in the next post.

Heading back to the mainland from Isla Colon in western Panama. We’ll be back in 2023!

An eyelash viper from western Ecuador