Sarah French had a paper from her PhD work just accepted at Insect Conservation and Diversity!  This paper (“The movement responses of three libellulid dragonfly species to open and closed landscape cover” French & McCauley) represents a huge project Sarah undertook to address one of the really difficult questions in landscape ecology – how do conditions in the matrix environment affect the movement of animals?  Addressing this question is difficult even in animals that can be tracked with active tags (e.g. satellite or radio tags) but with small insects? It’s almost, but not quite, impossible!  To tackle this question Sarah conducted a massive translocation experiment that moved three species of dragonflies to different conditions within the terrestrial matrix and then followed their flight behaviour.  She found that open environments appear to facilitate the movement of these animals more than forested environments.  This has important implications for the how landscape connectivity between populations of these animals will be affected by forest regrowth which is common in the upper Midwest and Northeast.  Nice work Sarah!

Congratulations to Rosemary Martin who has received a grant from the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Fund from the American Museum of Natural History!  This grant will help Rosemary continue her work exploring how winter conditions under the ice affect community structure in lakes and ponds and how decreased periods of ice duration resulting from climate change might restructure these communities.  Well done Rosie!!

Two students will be starting their PhDs in the lab this year, Kelly Murray-Stoker and Ilia Maria Ferzoco!  Ilia is completing her MSc in the lab studying the competition-colonization trade-off as a mechanism that may facilitate co-existence of congeneric backswimmers and will be starting her PhD in the fall.  Kelly completed her MS with Drs. Darold Batzer and Jospeh McHugh at the University of Georgia studying community change in the Ogeechee River.  Kelly was awarded a Connaught International Scholarship to from the University of Toronto to support her doctoral work and will be getting a running start on research on the caddisfly communities of the rivers and streams of the GTA starting this summer.  Welcome to both Kelly and Ilia – we’re excited to have you in the lab!

Celina and Ilia have had another paper accepted this month!  Their paper: Phenotype-by-environment interactions influence dispersal (Baines, Ferzoco, McCauley) which used a large scale field experiment to explore the effects of phenotype on dispersal behaviour in a semi-aquatic insect, has been accepted at the Journal of Animal Ecology. Great work!

Ilia and Celina had a manuscript “Co-occurring Notonecta (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Notonectidae) species differ in their behavioral response to cues of Belostoma (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Belostomatidae) predation risk” (Ferzoco, Baines, and McCauley) accepted at Annals of the Entomological Society of America.  It provides an interesting comparison of anti-predator behaviour in two co-occurring notonectid species.  Well done!

Rosemary Martin successfully completed her appraisal yesterday!  She gave an excellent talk which was attended by many in the department and many of her students from this year’s Freshwater Ecology class who had traveled downtown just to see her talk – a pretty amazing testament to what a fantastic TA she is!  Well done Rosie!

Dr. Dachin Frances and Dr. Sanja Hinic-Frlog recently published a case study with the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science on whether to list the Greater Sage Grouse.  They developed an exercise to engage students and deepen their understanding of the policy and biology of listing species.  This is a great resource for educators in biology and environmental science courses!  Fantastic work!

I had a great visit to give a seminar in Biology at the University of Arkansas.  It was wonderful to get a chance to catch up with Adam Siepielski and his lab who are doing amazing work! I really enjoyed the chance to talk with their AWIS group and meet people in the department.  Adam Hasik, one of Adam’s grad students interviewed me for their blog which was a lot of fun and their blog, Ecology for the Masses, which is well worth checking out for some fantastic posts!

Recent graduate Sarah French has been awarded a MITACS postdoctoral fellowship to conduct research in Dr. Rebecca Rooney’s lab at the University of Waterloo in collaboration with Ducks Unlimited.  Congratulations Sarah!  We can’t wait to see what you do next!

Celina’s newest paper is now up at Ecosphere: Baines, C.B. and S.J. McCauley. 2018. Natal habitat conditions have carryover effects on dispersal capacity and behavior.  Ecosphere 9(10: Article e02465.

The study presented here found that the developmental conditions animals experienced had a stronger affect on their adult dispersal behavior than did the resource level conditions in which adults found themselves prior to dispersal.  This work sheds new light on the importance of carry-over effects in shaping patterns of dispersal.

Nice work Celina!