Aldo Arellano ’17, who started with us as a research assistant with alum Sam Fey in 2015 and is now working on an Honors thesis, is featured in the Dartmouth news this week.

Check it out!

I was lucky enough to be interviewed a few weeks ago for Elizabeth Dunbar’s Minnesota Public Radio on cyanobacteria (aka blue-green algae) and their role in dog deaths.  My audio was cut out of the broadcast version, but the text is available or you can listen to the extended version online. Nothing particularly profound, but it’s cool to know that our work on cyanobacteria as modifiers of lake nutrient cycling is of interest beyond the narrow realm of ecology.

I had a really hard time figuring out how to choose a category and a theme for my ESA abstract this year, and so went through and screen-captured all of the menus so I could be strategic about my choices:

Master List of ESA Meeting categories & themes

May it help some others, as well!

Write-up on Kathy’s new position as the Dartmouth Professor in the Arts & Sciences

Amelia Ritger ’15 is off on a year-long adventure studying lionfish in Curacao, and is blogging about her experiences at The Roar of the Lionfish.  I encourage you to check it out, especially if you want to know more about tropical fish taxonomy, her current theme!

It’s been a week of back-to-back high profile papers for members of the lab. Go team go!

On January 8, the Team Gloeo PIs had our concepts & synthesis paper on cyanobacteria as drivers of nutrient cycling in lakes published in the open access journal Ecosphere. Because the work is on cyanobacteria (and perhaps because it was a slow news week?), several members of the media picked up on the story and we were covered on several local NPR affiliates as well as in The Blade and the Minnesota Post. (Thank you to all of my media training gurus for making the process somewhat less stressful, especially Katherine Lanpher, Catherine O’Neill, and the other folks from the OpEd Project!)

On January 12, postdoc Sam Fey had a paper describing recent increases in mass extinction events across a wide variety of organisms published in PNAS.  This, too, has been featured in a number of publications, including a just-aired radio interview.

As Sam told me yesterday, talking about our work can be very time-consuming, but it’s also a fun and an important part of the job!

I’ve been elected to be Member-at-Large of the Ecological Society of America starting at the close of the 100th annual meeting in August 2015.  I’m excited about this chance to serve the Society in a different way, and in particular to tackle issues about diversity in ecology, including ensuring that award nominations and presentations are done in a balanced way.

One of our senior Honors students, Annie Fagan ’15, is blogging about her field work adventures at Palo Verde in Costa Rica during December 2014.  Check it out at http://puravidapaloverde.wordpress.com

For now, I’ll just link to HER blog, but may reblog some of it later, as well.

Because there are three lab members who have birthdays in this seven-day window, we planned a “social” lab meeting with a lot of desserts today….

Unknown to me, the postdoc, grad student, and recent alum decided that it should be an event that required more formal attire than we might typically wear to lab meeting. They even went so far as to invite the Bio department’s Ecology & Evolutionary Biology lab coordinator, Craig Layne (second from right in the back row), to join us for the occasion.  He took them at their word and wore a jacket and tie for the event – while they dressed up to varying degrees themselves.

Coincidentally, I had meetings with the President, Provost, Dean of Faculty, and Associate Dean of the Sciences this afternoon, so I was more dressed up than usual myself (a dress! and tights!).

We thought it worth a photo, especially seeing Craig this dressed up – it might not happen again for another 20 years!

Lab meeting 13 November 2014: front row is Kathy, Ellen, Jess and Amelia; back row is Annie, Zach, Craig and Sam

The ringleader, though, did not dress up, and I’m expecting that pay-back is coming when she least expects it…

Lab member Zach Wood described how he found his passion for ecology in a piece for The Dartmouth during the spring