Dr Anja Felmy

I am an evolutionary biologist with strong research interests in life-history and mating-system evolution, behavioural and evolutionary ecology, and population and quantitative genetics.

In my Master’s thesis, supervised by Dr. Erik Postma at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, I reconstructed the pedigree of a Swiss village based on church records and used this dataset to predict evolutionary changes in human reproductive timing. During my PhD project in Prof. Jukka Jokela’s group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, I characterised the mating system of a simultaneously hermaphroditic, self-compatible freshwater snail using both field and laboratory experiments, combined with genetic parentage analyses.

In my current work in Prof. Tim Coulson’s group, my primary aim is to test empirically whether predictions of evolutionary change can be improved by accounting for environmental variability. I am doing this using Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata), which provide a convincing example of rapid, repeatable evolutionary change in the wild.

Note that some of these papers were published under my maiden name, A. Buerkli.

T. Coulson, T. Potter and A. Felmy. 2021. Predicting evolution over multiple generations in deteriorating environments using evolutionarily explicit Integral Projection Models. Evolutionary Applications. In press. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eva.13272?af=R
A. Felmy, J. Leips and J. Travis. 2021. Ancestral ecological regime shapes reaction to food limitation in the Least Killifish, Heterandria formosa. Ecology and Evolution 11(11): 6391-6405. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.7490
A. Felmy, N. Weissert, J. Travis and J. Jokela. 2020. Mate availability determines use of alternative reproductive phenotypes in hermaphrodites. Behavioral Ecology 31(4): 1003–1016. https://academic.oup.com/beheco/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/beheco/araa046/5840935
A. Buerkli and J. Jokela. 2017. Increase in multiple paternity across the reproductive lifespan in a sperm-storing, hermaphroditic freshwater snail. Molecular Ecology 26(19): 5264-5278. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.14200/full
A. Irniger, M. J. Morari, A. Buerkli and M. Detert. 2017. Automatic high-throughput measurement of live aquatic snails from images. Journal of Molluscan Studies 83(2): 235-239. https://academic.oup.com/mollus/article/83/2/235/3063775
A. Buerkli, N. Sieber, K. Seppaelae and J. Jokela. 2017. Comparing direct and indirect selfing rate estimates: When are population structure estimates reliable? Heredity 118(6): 525-533. https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy20171
A. Buerkli and A. B. Wilson. 2017. Explaining high-diversity death assemblages: Undersampling of the living community, out-of-habitat transport, time-averaging of rare taxa, and local extinction. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 466: 174-183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.11.022
A. Buerkli and E. Postma. 2014. Genetic constraints underlying human reproductive timing in a pre-modern Swiss village. Evolution 68(2): 526-537. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12287/abstract

Dr Anja Felmy

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Selected Publications