Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 6)

In November we had a fund visit by Emma Lehmberg, who came to Norman to collect fishes for her super cool PhD project.

Ingo went to France for a quick trip to work with Frank Cezilly from the University of Burgundy to work on ideas and projects in the Carribean, with support from the Caribaea Initiative.

Fall is here, but things do not slow down. I went to Bonn, Germany to celebrate the 250th birth year of the famous scientist Alexander von Humboldt with colleagues and friends from the Humboldt Society. What a great event!

Early October brought a visitor to our group. Juliane Lukas from the IGB in Berlin, Germany. It was great to have her in town!

Last month saw a flurry of activities, including a trip to Mexico for the 8th Poeciliid conference, hosted by UNAM. It was fantastic! Although Trai is in Germany, his poster got attention. Rodet presented a great poster, and my talk went well (I think). Kerri-Ann had a nice poster on invasive fishes in Jamaica. Overall, a very successful meeting!

I just got back to Norman, teaching again. It is nice to be back!

With help from Rodet I am initiating the first steps for our NSF funded project. I hope to add a post-doc to the team early next year.

I overlapped only a few days with Trai, who is now in Potsdam for his Fulbright! Congratulations once again!

Just as I spent a few great days with Karel Janko and his group discussing unisexual fishes. And I got an e-mail from NSF saying that my proposal with Francisco Ubeda from Royal Holloway to study the origin of Amazon mollies was funded! This will keep me busy for a few years.

Photos by Jan Koci.

Well, time flies. My sabbatical is in the final weeks and I look forward to returning to Norman in August! I’ll teach my Statistics and Experimental Design class in the Fall semester and that should be fun.

In June I gave two invited seminars. One was in Wilhelmshaven at the Vogelwarte. They have an amazing long-term study on terns. Too bad the terns eat fish….

My second invite took me to Bonn, where I was able to chat with Timo Thuenken about his great work on Cichlid behavior.

Another true highlight was the Hybridization Symposium at the University of Hamburg. It brought together an amazing group of people working on one of the many aspects of hybridization. Personally, it was awesome to reconnect with and spend time with Rosemary and Peter Grant. They are among my scientific heroes!

In other news, Trai was awarded ABS Diversity Travel Award to attend this year’s joint meeting of the 56th Annual Conference of the Animal Behavior Society. That will be a great meeting!

Rodet and myself travels to the Dominican Republic for two separate purposes: to attend a conference and to do some field work. The conference we attended was the annual conference of the Caribaea Initiative. This was an amazing meeting of scientist from many different countries across the Caribbean to discuss conservation activities and strategies. Rodet gave a great talk on thermal tolerance in the genus Limia, and I was honored to deliver one of the keynotes. We stayed in a hotel right on the Malecon. Unfortunately, we had to see large floating fields of algae, that can destroy whole beaches.

After the conference we teamed up with Patricia Torres Pineda from the Natural History Museum in Santo Domingo to search for Limia in the north of the island. We found some beautiful Limia, but also a healthy population of introduced Xiphophorus maculatus.

It does not get much better than this: congratulations to Trai for being awarded a Fulbright fellowship to work in Germany in the lab of Ralph Tiedemann in Potsdam. This is an amazing success!

The 8th Conference of Poeciliid Biologists is coming up in September! I will submit my abstract today! I plan to talk about a mate choice project with guppies…….

For more info go to the conference homepage!