SICB 2015 approaching fast!

I've been busily working on my symposia talk for SICB 2015 in West Palm Beach, FL.  I'm excited to talk about performance integration in the context of suction feeding in fishes!  I will present some ideas I have been working on in my dissertation, like a multivariate method for quantifying performance integration, as well as some new ideas about how integration can contribute to patterns of diversity in fish feeding.  If that isn't enticing enough, there are also 7 high speed videos of animals catching (or attempting to catch) prey!

Come see my talk!

Wednesday Jan. 7, 1:30pm

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!