A lot has happened since the last post. The semester flew by and I had a great time teaching Animal Communication. The best part for me was that we invited colleagues to meet with us and discuss their research and life with us. Almost everybody said yes to the request and the interactions were fantastic.

In good news, the year started with a nice paper by Chance Powell coming out in Behavioral Ecology. In this paper we looked for differences in male mate choice in a fish species from Hispaniola, Limia perugiae. We did not find any. Now we are looking for morphological differences……

A little later, another paper on mate choice came out, this time on female preferences in Poecilia latipinna and P. mexicana. And their F1’s. We found no preferences, which may support the idea that indiscriminate females may have been involved in the hybrid origin of the Amazon molly. But negative data is always tricky to interpret…… The lead author on this was Caden Smith, then an undergrad funded by an REU from NSF. He is now a Masters student in the lab working on mudskippers. Stay tuned!

Finally, in bittersweet news, Waldir has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Western Florida in Pensacola. He will be moving shortly. All the best for the future! His projects are goldmines of data and we will be publishing together for a very long time. We plan to present some of the data at the Poeciliid Conference in San Marcos in October.

Aurelia sp. in the California Academy of Science.
A gecko who wants to be a twig. Also California Academy of Science.