Here’s a beautiful “studio” shoot of our laboratory’s cover girl, Rotiferella, taken by Stefan using a stereomicroscope. This is a mictic female of Brachionus calyciflorus carrying five male eggs.
SIGNAL
Mollie Brooks, our new quantitative ecologist
We have a new quantitative ecologist joining our ranks, Mollie Brooks, who is a recent PhD graduate from University of Florida, Gainesville. Fresh out of Ben Bolker’s group, Mollie is bringing with her much needed skills in statistical and demographic analysis, and to our pleasant surprise, in baking!
During her postdoc, Mollie will contribute to our research projects on early warning signals and resurrecting past eco-evolutionary responses.
Eco-evolutionary Dynamics Workshop in Leiden
This week, Cindy and I participated in the “Eco-evolutionary Dynamics in a Changing World” workshop at Lorentz Center, Leiden.
The organisers, Stephanie Jenouvrier, Thomas Reed and Marcel Visser, brought together a select group of researchers working at the interface of ecology and evolution, from both theoretical and empirical backgrounds, to brainstorm on our current understanding of eco-evolutionary dynamics. Unlike most other workshops, this one had quite an interesting format. There were only a few plenary talks, and most of the time participants held smaller break-out sessions on their own research area. Although there were no final road-maps or even a clear definition of eco-evolutionary semantics, these break-out sessions, I think, worked very well for tossing around ideas and discussing more specialised topics among those with shared interests. For our part, we received great input on our two projects.
1000+ new group members, the Brachionus rotifers
Our first rotifers, algae, lab equipment and chemicals have finally arrived, and Dr. Diego Fontaneto came over from Institute of Ecosystem Studies (Verbania) to teach us how to handle these little guys and keep them happy. First experiments will commence soon..
Stefan Sommer, our new rotifer meister
Many long-term studies on larger vertebrates provide us with only a single time series to study population dynamics. To test all the interesting hypotheses arising from these studies, we have to shrink those systems into tubes and replicate under different treatments. For this, with the invaluable help of Dr. Diego Fontaneto (Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Italy), we chose the rotifers as our experimental system. It didn’t take too long for us to realize that we needed expert help. And that help arrived as a swiss-army-knife of a guy: Stefan Sommers, our research associate, rotifer-meister, orchestrator of our microcosm lab!