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…
Amelia Ritger ’15 is spending the summer studying lionfish in the Caribbean: click here to learn more
(photo from blog post by Kate Peach linked above)
Our recent Freshwater Science paper, Carey et al. (2014), is available free for a three month period, courtesy of being the Featured Article in the June 2014 issue.
Gloeotrichia echinulata
This paper reports on the first 8 years of monitoring the recruitment of our favorite charismatic microflora, Gloeotrichia echinulata, from the sediments into the water column of Lake Sunapee, NH.
Like many cyanobacteria, Gloeotrichia forms resting stages, or akinetes, to tolerate adverse conditions such as winter. Cued by decreasing light and temperatures, and possibly decreasing nutrients, during late summer and early fall, akinete formation is followed by the collapse of the water column population. Parent colonies senesce and sink to the bottom, awaiting environmental cues to germinate and then return to the water column in a subsequent spring.
Recruitment trap deployed in Lake Sunapee, July 2014
Since 2005 – when Cayelan Carey did her senior Honors thesis on Gloeotrichia – we have placed traps out in Lake Sunapee to catch this organism as it returns to the water column – see photo at right. We sample the traps by snorkeling once each week beginning in May and ending in mid-to-late September.
By deploying multiple traps at a site, and having multiple sites around the lake, and doing this for many summers, we were able to begin dissecting what might cue recruitment in this species in this lake.
The punchline of the paper is that mixing of the nearshore waters – as typically happens in late summer when the surface of the lake begins to cool down at night – appears stimulate recruitment. In years with warmer August overnight air temperatures, there was much less Gloeotrichia recruitment than in years with colder overnight temperatures.
The next step is to determine whether this might also hold true in other lakes – and for other cyanobacteria.
Meanwhile, we will continue to enjoy our close encounters with other freshwater life during the weekly snorkeling trips!
Smallmouth bass who built a nest adjacent to one of our recruitment traps in 2014
KLC, 14 July 2014
Lab member Zach Wood described how he found his passion for ecology in a piece for The Dartmouth during the spring
Well, we’re taking the plunge and trying a lab website using Word Press. Hopefully this will make it easier to keep things updated more often and for others in the lab to make substantive contributions!
