Jeffrey McKinnon

Mar 16, 2024 | livescience.com | Jeffrey McKinnon

Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia, is the world's oldest and deepest freshwater lake and, due to its age and isolation, is exceptionally biodiverse — but this remarkable ecosystem is under threat from global warming. In this excerpt from Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History (MIT Press, 2023), Jeffrey McKinnon examines the regime shift that is now taking place at the lake.

Jan 5, 2024 | thereader.mitpress.mit.edu | Emmanuelle Pouydebat |Erik Butler |Jeffrey McKinnon |Prosanta Chakrabarty

BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently. There may be nothing unnatural in nature, but nature still encompasses much that seems fantastically strange — the amazingly multifarious sex lives of animals, for example.

Dec 16, 2023 | popsci.com | Jeffrey McKinnon

SHARE This article was originally featured on MIT Press. This article is adapted from Jeffrey McKinnon’s book “Our Ancient Lakes.“Glance around any social event and it’s obvious that people, like all living things, vary in most any trait one can see or measure. And with our newfound ability to sequence entire genomes from thousands of species, we are learning that even more variation is hidden in our DNA.

Dec 4, 2023 | nautil.us | Jeffrey McKinnon

Our story begins in 1954, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in what was then Belgian Congo, with a little paper about fish diets titled “A Curious Ecological ‘Niche’ among the Fishes of Lake Tanganyika.”The authors, biologists Georges Marlier and Narcisse Leleup, describe a little-studied species of cichlid fish. According to their findings, adults subsist mainly on the scales of other fish, which they tear off their living prey with fearsome teeth.

Dec 1, 2023 | thereader.mitpress.mit.edu | Prosanta Chakrabarty |Dario Floreano |Nicola Nosengo |Jeffrey McKinnon

BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently. Glance around any social event and it’s obvious that people, like all living things, vary in most any trait one can see or measure. And with our newfound ability to sequence entire genomes from thousands of species, we are learning that even more variation is hidden in our DNA. Working out how all this variation persists has been one of the great challenges of evolutionary biology.