Animal color signals may function as indicators of fighting ability when males compete for access to females. This allows opponents to settle aggressive interactions before they escalate into physical combat and injury. Thus, there may be strong directional selection on these traits, towards enhanced signal quality. This renders sexually selected traits particularly susceptible to inbreeding depression, due to relatively low ratios of additive genetic variance to dominance variance. We measured the effects of inbreeding on an intrasexually selected color signal ("the badge") in a population of Swedish sand lizards (Lacerta agilis) using the Rhh software based on 17-21 microsatellites. Males of this sexually dichromatic species use the badge during aggressive interactions to display, and assess, fighting ability. We found negative effects of homozygosity on badge size, saturation, and brightness. However, no such effects were observed on color hue. Pair-wise correlations between badge size, hue, and saturation were all statistically significant. Thus, the sand lizard 'badge' is a multicomponent signal with variation explained by covariation in badge size, saturation and color hue. Body mass corrected for skeletal size ("body condition") positively predicted badge size and saturation, encouraging future research on the extent that sexual signals may convey information on multigene targets (i.e., 'genic capture').

Robert (Bob) Keith Wayne lost his battle with cancer in his home on 26 December 2022 with his wife, Dr. Blaire Van Valkenburgh, by his side. This essay, written by his former graduate students, highlights the foundation that survives Bob and our vision of continuing his efforts in building a future for endangered species.

Despite increasing sequencing efforts, numerous fish families still lack a reference genome, which complicates genetic research. One such understudied family is the sand lances (Ammodytidae, literally: 'sand burrower'), a globally distributed clade of over 30 fish species that tend to avoid tidal currents by burrowing into the sand. Here, we present the first annotated chromosome-level genome assembly of the great sand eel (Hyperoplus lanceolatus). The genome assembly was generated using Oxford Nanopore Technologies long sequencing reads and Illumina short reads for polishing. The final assembly has a total length of 808.5 Mbp, of which 97.1% were anchored into 24 chromosome-scale scaffolds using proximity-ligation scaffolding. It is highly contiguous with a scaffold and contig N50 of 33.7 Mbp and 31.3 Mbp, respectively, and has a BUSCO completeness score of 96.9%. The presented genome assembly is a valuable resource for future studies of sand lances, as this family is of great ecological and commercial importance and may also contribute to studies aiming to resolve the suprafamiliar taxonomy of bony fishes.

Comparisons of intraspecific genetic diversity across species can reveal the roles of geography, ecology, and life history in shaping biodiversity. The wide availability of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences in open-access databases makes this marker practical for conducting analyses across several species in a common framework, but patterns may not be representative of overall species diversity. Here, we gather new and existing mtDNA sequences and genome-wide nuclear data (genotyping-by-sequencing; GBS) for 30 North American squamate species sampled in the Southeastern and Southwestern United States. We estimated mtDNA nucleotide diversity for two mtDNA genes, COI (22 species alignments; average 16 sequences) and cytb (22 species; average 58 sequences), as well as nuclear heterozygosity and nucleotide diversity from GBS data for 118 individuals (30 species; four individuals and 6,820-44,309 loci per species). We showed that nuclear genomic diversity estimates were highly consistent across individuals for some species, while other species showed large differences depending on the locality sampled. Range size was positively correlated with both cytb diversity (Phylogenetically Independent Contrasts: R 2 = 0.31, p = 0.007) and GBS diversity (R 2 = 0.21; p = 0.006), while other predictors differed across the top models for each dataset. Mitochondrial and nuclear diversity estimates were not correlated within species, although sampling differences in the data available made these datasets difficult to compare. Further study of mtDNA and nuclear diversity sampled across species' ranges is needed to evaluate the roles of geography and life history in structuring diversity across a variety of taxonomic groups.