The lab (Dachin, Sarah, Rosemary, and Celina) won the award for best gingerbread house in the UTMAGS competition last night!  You can see why!

Dachin is one of this year’s recipients of the Zimmerman/Weis Fellowships for graduate students in EEB working at the Koffler Scientific Reserve. These awards are given on a competitive basis to students whose work is based at KSR.  Well done Dachin!

Celina has been award a Dr. Lloyd M. Dosdall Memorial Scholarship from the Entomological Society of Canada. This award will contribute to her research on the ecology and evolution of dispersal in notonectids.  Nice work Celina!

There have been a number of great things happening in the lab and I have been slow in posting on them so here goes.

Congratulations to Chris Searcy who will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami in January!

Congratulations to Sarah French who passed her appraisal and has advanced to candidacy!

Congratulations to Maria Chavez, an undergraduate from Karen Mabry’s lab working on our California project, who has had her first paper “Differential larval responses of two ecologically similar insects (Odonata) to temperature and resource variation” (authors: Chavez, Mabry, McCauley, Hammond) at the International Journal of Odonatology and who is starting her master’s at the University of Wisconsin – Madison working on odonates as predators of pests in cranberry bogs.

Finally congratulations to the whole lab for an excellent set of presentations at ESA this year  – well done!

Sarah has received two fellowships this year!  She was awarded an NSERC graduate fellowship this spring and just received news she was awarded the Norman Stuart Robertson Fellowship through the University of Toronto’s School of Graduate Studies.  Well done Sarah!!

The Entomological Society of Canada contacted Celina about her recent paper in Ecology & Evolution and asked her to write a blog post on it.  Check it out!

Dachin and Sarah have both received Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Grants from the American Museum of Natural History to help fund their dissertation research!  These grants are given to support research on North American fauna and these awards will help support Dachin’s research on the effects of climate change on odonate performance and Sarah’s work on the effects of land-use change on odonate movement behaviour.  Well done!!

Shantel Catania gave an outstanding presentation on her 481 research in the Biology Symposium.  Her talk “The big impact of little larvae on parasite abundances in freshwater systems” was recognized during the awards ceremony with an award of first runner-up for this event.  Well done Shantel!!

Celina’s second paper within the year has been accepted!  This paper presents research from her master’s on how body condition affects dispersal propensity in notonectids.  The paper: “Dispersal depends on body condition and predation risk in the semi-aquatic insect, Notonecta undulata” will appear in Ecology & Evolution.  Nice work Celina!

Shantel’s first paper from research she’s done in the lab as an undergraduate has been accepted at The Canadian Entomologist! This paper establishes the use of coded-wire tags as a safe and useful tool in individually identifying dragonfly larvae. This opens up the potential to ask a whole set of new questions on individual level variation affects ecological and evolutionary processes in this system. Well done Shantel!