Call for data!

If you or anyone you know has the following data, can you pass it along?  I need predator swimming velocity and predator gape during prey capture.  Also if you happen to have performed a correlation between the two, include that.  Thanks!

Please update my Google spreadsheet
https://drive.google.com/open?id=14KnNehibm2RtYDeanUebNs0mpBhyf0hGqTA_a49Efko&authuser=0

Math, Science, Tech Day at CSU

The CSU Guppy Group volunteered for CSU Math, Science, Tech Day, where local 4th grade students from primarily underrepresented communities were invited to CSU to experience the campus and learn about research, in an effort to demonstrate that a college education is attainable and exciting.  We again used our guppies to teach about adaptation and natural/artificial selection.  One student even told me ours was the best demonstration all day, so they seemed to have enjoyed it!  Thanks to Dale and Lisa for organizing, and John, Sarah, and Austin for helping run the event!

Observing the colors on a low predation guppy

Coloring a pet store guppy

Dale discussing how environment shapes a guppy's traits

First trip to Trinidad!

Last week I took my first trip to Trinidad.  Even though it was the wet season, we needed to get fish to start a breeding experiment, so we took our chances.  Unfortunately, it poured down rain most of the time we were there, turning small creeks into raging rivers.  It started raining on our way home from the site we sampled on the second day, and the hour drive down the the windy, bumpy, mountain road we came up on turned into a dangerous, flooded, muddy mess, consequently causing the rental car agent to scowl at Cam when he returned the car.  Fortunately, we made it back and waited the rain out for the next 2 days by checking out sites and visiting the Asa Wright Nature Center, a renowned birder's paradise.  On our last day, we made up for lost time and sampled 3 sites in one day, and another team of researchers sampled a 4th site for us!  So in all, it was a successful trip, but hopefully next time it will be the dry season, and we will have more time to explore more of Trinidad.  I feel like this was my first "real" field experience, where we were basically camping at the field station - I had to sleep in a mosquito net - and I got more dirty and wet in one day than I have in an entire week!  Now I am officially a field biologist and I love it!

Using butterfly nets to catch guppies in Trinidadian streams

More photos here!

Upcoming conferences and talks

I am off to a fast start here in Fort Collins, but I am looking forward to the new experiences.  I just registered yesterday to attend and present a talk at the Guild of Rocky Mountain Ecologists and Evolutionary Biologists (GREEBs) in about a month.  This is a meeting that several members of the Ghalambor lab attend, and it brings together a wide range of local researchers from Colorado and Wyoming.  The location is also fantastic - in the Rocky Mountains when the leaves are changing! This will be a great opportunity to talk about my research to a new audience and meet other local scientists!

Also, thanks to Tim Higham for inviting me to give a symposium talk at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in West Palm Beach, FL this January.  The symposium is co-organized with Peter Wainwright, and is titled "New insights into suction feeding biomechanics and evolution".  Not only am I excited to give an integrative and forward thinking talk on complexity and integration, but Tim and I are also working on submitting a complementary review paper to go with it.  This will be a great opportunity to get some of my ideas out and share them with lots of other researchers!

CSU

I have officially arrived in Fort Collins, CO (although I don't technically start the fellowship until Sept. 1)!  I really enjoyed spending time with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law on the drive out!  We stopped in Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and the Continental Divide (NM).  I think we may have been the only ones with a rabbit at the Grand Canyon! But it was too hot to leave the boys in the car.  

Diego (dog) and Bruce (bunny) at the Grand Canyon!

I haven't had much time to settle in though, because a few days after I arrived my dad came to town in his RV.  So of course we took the obligatory road trip to get to know my new home state.  We drove through Rocky Mountain National Park where we saw pika, marmot, and elk and evaded a thunderstorm.  Then we Parked the RV at Cheyenne Mountain State Park and took the motorcycle to Pike's Peak and Mt. Evans, where it snowed both times!  We also saw a bighorn sheep and several herds of mountain goats.  On the way back home we stopped at the Manitou Cliff Dwellings to see the ruins.  See more photos here.  I guess now that I've been introduced to Colorado, it's time to get to work!

Mountain goat selfie!