TED: science in prison

SciFri Video: Leps under water

I have seen Dan Rubinoff speak about these leps and others he studies at various conferences.  It's really amazing work. I actually inquired a bit about working with him at one point, a long time ago. He's really great and is finding some interesting things in Hawaii.

MEEC 2010

This weekend is the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference in Ames, Iowa.  Last night was the first of three plenary talks, delivered by Dr. Jeff Feder. I was somewhat familiar with his work and really interested in hearing more about his take on mechanisms that promote speciation.  The talk was so much better than I could have ever expected.  He captured many aspects that are of increasing interest to me including speciation, insects as model organisms, sympatric speciation (ecological), post/prezygotic isolation, biodiversity... It gave me a new lease on life by hearing him talk about these large concepts that drive his research because we share so much in common. 

Before his talk I sat down with a friend and mentor, just to catch up because I hadn't seen her in a while.  We talked about life and work and the balance of those to ever important items.  Many women at the same stage as I am now drop out of the pipeline.  Disappear from academia and become mothers, or follow their spouses to jobs.  It's a very difficult decision to "sacrifice" your work for that of someone else.  Even successful people drop out at this juncture.  So these thoughts were going through my mind as I was captivated by fly-parasite-plant interactions. 

I don't know where we will be in a year, two years, four years.  But hopefully my work can take a new direction at this point.  Not that the current direction is bad, but I have other ideas on how to integrate my interests in ecology, evolution and entomology.

Blogging from NCB ESA

This week is spring break, which for many may mean white sand beaches and sunny skies.  The skies here in Louisville have not been sunny and the temperatures colder than I was hoping for by going south.  But the Brown Hotel is beautiful, the streets lively and the entertainment enlightening.  I've been at the North Central Branch meeting of the Entomological Society of America, arriving Saturday night and leaving tomorrow morning.  You may be thinking to yourself "gosh, Kentucky doesn't seem like 'north central' to me".  It didn't to me, but the lines need to be drawn somewhere so here we are in sunny, warm Kentucky.  Well, last week it was sunny and warm at least.

I came, mainly to give a presentation on the recent modeling work I've been doing on common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica L.), and correlating the distribution with soybean aphid (Aphis glycines), looking for trends over time.  I know little to nothing about soybean aphids, especially in comparison to folks at this conference where soybean aphids are one of the pests on soybeans and most people here work in the soybean growing region.  My worst fears were realized minutes from disembarking from the plane.  A fellow entomologist spotted me and quickly inferred that I was a bug nerd (how I'm not sure, I wasn't wearing the standard caddisfly earrings or bee broach).  He quickly starting asking me questions about the supercooling point of soybean aphids and other questions for which I had no answers.  My talk did not go the greatest.  The power strip connecting the projector and laptop was placed right at the feet of the presenter and I happened to step right on the on/off switch, which turned off the projector and needed a long time to cool down and warm back up.  I plowed through okay, but was flustered for the rest of the talk.  Better luck next time.

Others have had similar problems, but in general the talks have gone well and most importantly are more insightful than I was expecting.  The symposium today on organics was mostly not about insects, and provided a lot of interesting talks.  The overarching theme of these talks was that not all organic farmers are battling insect pests.  This may boil down to the differences in soil between conventional and organic farms.  Larry Phelan at OSU gave a really interesting talk on the differences in soil between these two types of farms. My other favorite talk from this symposium was on using hogs to control plum curculio in Michigan.  In addition to being very successful as a method of integrated pest management, my favorite part of this talk was referring to hogs that have gone to market as "long since bacon".

The other symposium I really enjoyed was new innovations in entomology on the first day.  Many of the talks were about using new technologies to answer long standing questions in entomology.  There are really some creative people doing fascinating research.  One of them is Eileen Hebets at Nebraska. I had seen her give a talk at ISU and was therefore familiar with her work. If you have a chance to see her talk, she does some really creative research.

Overall, some of the statistical methods have made me cringe, the lack of evolutionary considerations are disappointing and at times the degree of science is not what I'm used to.  There have been very few talks on evolution or systematics. On more than one occasion after asking what I work on and hearing the response, people have said "what are you doing here then?".  It's too bad that this attitude exists within some of the members.  That said, the diversity of talks is better than I was expecting. There was an entire symposium on gene silencing, which for this conference is a step in the right direction.

Year of Biodiversity

Did you know that 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, declared by the United Nations?  I certainly didn't.  I know I'm doing my part this year by describing a new species. What are you doing?