Michael A. Bell

University of California Museum of Paleontology

Mike Bell retired after 40-years on the faculty in 2019 and is a Research Associate at the University of California Museum Paleontology in Berkeley. He is continuing his research using collections of fossil and extant Threespine Stickleback that he assembled during five decades of research. He founded experimental populations in three lakes (2009, 2011, 2019) using sea-run stickleback and samples them and naturally founded lake populations in lakes around Cook Inlet, Alaska each June to extend evolutionary time series in them. His research concerns variation, development, and genetics of skeletal traits in Threespine Stickleback, but he has collaborated with molecular geneticists for 20 years on the genetics of skeletal traits and population genomics of lake populations founded recently by sea-run stickleback. Publications that reflect his current interests include:

Bell, M. A., W. E. Aguirre, and N. J. Buck. 2004. Twelve years of contemporary armor evolution in a threespine stickleback population. Evolution 58:814-824.

Stuart, Y. E., M. P. Travis, and M. A. Bell. 2020. Inferring the genetic architecture underlying evolution in a fossil stickleback lineage. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 4:1549-1557.

Roberts Kingman, G. A., D. Lee, F. C. Jones, D. Desmet, M. A. Bell, and D.M. Kingsley. 2021. Longer or shorter spines: reciprocal trait evolution in stickleback via triallelic regulatory changes in Stanniocalcin2a. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 118:e210069411.

Roberts Kingman, G. A. 2021. Kingman, G. A. R., D. N. Vyas, F. C. Jones, S. D. Brady, H. I. Chen, K. Reid, M. Milhaven, T. S. Bertino, W. E. Aguirre, D. C. Heins, F. A. von Hippel, P. J. Park, M. Kirch, D. M. Absher, R. M. Myers, F. DiPalma, M. A. Bell,
D. M. Kingsley, and K. R. Veeramah. 2021. Predicting future from past: The genomic basis of recurrent and rapid stickleback evolution. Sci. Adv. 7:eabg5285.