The first paper from our work at the Quail Ridge Reserve in California on the effects of environmental warming on dragonflies has been accepted!  This paper entitled “Effects of experimental warming on survival, phenology and morphology of an aquatic insect (Odonata)” will appear in Ecological Entomology (Authors: Shannon J. McCauley, John I. Hammond, Dachin N. Frances, & Karen E. Mabry).  We are continuing work in this system and excited to see what we find next.

Chris and Shannon received a grant from the University of Toronto Mississauga Research and Scholarly Activity Fund (OVPR) to use stable isotopes to investigate the development of food web structure in the newly created Koffler Scientific Reserve Experimental Pond Array.  This funding will allow us to apply a new tool to investigate the factors structuring the communities in these ponds and trophic interactions between species during this process.

Sarah French has received funding for her graduate studies from the Eleanor Cate Allen Fellowship and from the Reino S. Freeman Fellowship.  Well done Sarah!

Celina Baines who will be entering the lab in Fall has had her first paper accepted and it is now available in early on-line at Biology Letters.  This paper is from undergraduate research she completed in Locke Rowe’s lab examining context-dependent dispersal in notonectids.  She found that the emigration behaviour was sensitive to both predators and density, and critically that there are interactions between these factors.  Check it out at Biology Letters.

Well done Celina!

Tammy Duong has won the Dean’s Excellence Award in Research for her senior thesis “The effects of non-consumptive predation stress on immune response in Libellulid dragonflies”.  This is a competitive award given to an undergraduate research student at UTM and reflects the really outstanding work Tammy accomplished over the past year.

Congratulations Tammy!

Two paper from on-going collaborations have been recently accepted.  The first, on which EEB graduate student Aaron Hall is lead author, is from research in the Georgian Bay.  This paper “Recreational boating, landscape configuration, and local habitat structure as drivers of odonate community composition in an island setting” (authors: Hall, McCauley, and Fortin) will appear in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity.  Well done Aaron!

The second from the long-term survey of the freshwater communities of the E.S. George Reserve, is “Cross-scale interactions and the distribution-abundance relationship” which uses inter-specific contrasts and long-term intraspecific patterns in habitat occupancy and abundance to disentangle the forces underlying the positive abundance-occupancy relationship seen across multiple systems.  This paper (authors: Werner, Davis, Skelly, Relyea, Benard, McCauley) will appear in PLOS One.

I had a great trip to Queen’s University to give a seminar in their EEB series.  It was wonderful to see the work happening over there and to hang out with Shelley Arnott’s lab who are doing exciting work on invasion biology, recovery of lake communities from perturbation, and metacommunity ecology in freshwater systems.

Tammy Duong won the award for best presentation in the Annual Biology Symposium yesterday!  She presented her 481 research which investigated how exposure to non-lethal (caged) predators affects immune response in odonate larvae.  Her talk was entitled “The effects of non-consumptive predation stress on immune response in libellulid dragonflies”.  Well done Tammy!

Tammy Duong has been admitted to the MSc program in Biology at Carleton University to work with Professor Tom Sherratt.  Well done Tammy!

Last Friday I had a wonderful visit to Wilfrid Laurier!  I was able to catch up with Tristan Long , see some of the awesome research happening in his lab and by other folks in the department, and give a seminar to the department that wrapped up with some of the best student questions I’ve ever gotten.  It was a great day!