University of Michigan
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

EEB graduate student Jeremy Wright won the 2011 EEB Outstanding Student Paper Award for "Conservative Coevolution of Müllerian Mimicry in a Group of Rift Lake Catfish," the cover story in the February issue of Evolution.

“We chose this paper because the author used a variety of approaches to answer an interesting and understudied question about how Müllerian mimicry evolves,” wrote Joseph Coolon, one of the postdoctoral fellows who reviewed the submitted papers. “The author used creative, well-performed assays using evolutionarily interesting non-model organisms and the results show a novel mechanism for the origin of Müllerian mimicry and also characterized one of few known examples of Müllerian mimicry in vertebrates.  Finally, the paper was well-written, accessible to people in other fields, and claims are supported throughout. While all the papers submitted were great, we feel that this paper stood out as the best overall.”

Every year one graduate student paper is selected based on approach of study, scope of findings, and insights into questions of broad scientific interest using multiple lines of evidence. The prize is $500.