Conference Part 3

I'm off to Minnesota tomorrow, to do a bit of mosquito collection, but mostly to present my transect study microsatellite research at Evolution 2008. I'll try to blog a bit about it, as I'm sure there will be lots of good presentations. My poster looks great, save one small spelling error, and I'm quite happy with it.

The bonus is that I get to stay with my brother and his wife, and my nephews (sister's kids) are visiting, so we'll have a good time on that front as well. I also get to squeeze in a short visit with CB before he goes off to Nova Scotia with a tour (yea Puffins!).

My Own Personal Hybrid Zone

I studied plant hybridization in school, and from an evolutionary biology perspective, it's a fascinating phenomenon because of the tie-ins to speciation and adaptation. Novel combinations of genes are produced via hybridization, and those new combos may be just what's needed to adapt to a new habitat. Add the elements of time and some isolation and it can lead to new species.

Unlike zoologists, botanists aren't quite as hung up on whether "good" species (i.e. "real" species) need to be completely reproductively isolated from each other. In other words, two groups of organisms can be valid species based on genetics, or ecological factors, and yet (oops, I had this wrong in the previous draft) hybridize to produce fertile offspring. Often the hybridization comes as a secondary thing, and more often these days, from human disturbance that makes some sort of bridge that brings formerly isolated species together.

When I bought my house in 2005, the sellers had put in a nice little front garden, and landscaped it with xeriscaping species. The plants have largely performed as advertised, I don't water it much, and it looks nice. They planted three kinds of Penstemon, and those have really done well. So much so that I have my own hybrid zone, where parental species, as well as intermediates can be seen.

My camera, sadly, is at my brother's house in MN, so I can't take a picture, but these pictures, from the fabulous Wayne's Word website give you the idea. Notice how F1s (that's "first filial generation, or the first hybrid offspring of pure parents) are a nice 50:50 split. It's not always that clean, but gives bumbling scientists a clue that hybridization is occurring. Then, as hybrids cross with hybrids, and hybrids backcross to parents ("BCs"), you can get a wide variety of forms, and presumably different abilities to adapt to environmental conditions.

How do these biological mix ups occur? Well, you can blame it on the pollinators, who work a patch of flowers and end up transferring pollen between species. That's exactly how it looks in my garden, where there are plants with blue flowers, and pink flowers (who, of course aren't going to change, as they are perennials), and then the intermediate flowers have combinations of blue and pink. Maybe I'll get a cool new Penstemon variety I can propagate.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!!

Hey! That's recyclable!

When I started my current job, one of things that impressed me (and not in the good way) was the amount of plastic "lab consumables" we throw out for lack of a recycling program. And it wasn't really that we didn't want to do it, it was more that there wasn't a market for it, so no one would take it.

There is some stuff that we use, like pipette tips, that have to be autoclaved and thrown away because they might have biological nasties on them. But there are other things, like the plastic bottles that non-toxic reagents come in, that could be recycled. And the boxes that hold those pipette tips have a nice #5 stamped on the bottom of each and every one. If I'm setting up a run on the sequencer to do fragment analysis with my microsatellites, I can easily go through 10 boxes in a day. I use the tips, I toss the box, repeat.

Just today, I read that our county recycling program at the landfill is now accepting most plastics stamped 1-7. Wow. It will hopefully cut way down on the stuff going into the landfill, and people can feel good about recycling. I'm going to send an email on Monday to the proper people at work to see if we can set out recycling bins and keep that waste out of the landfill. I'm actually kind of excited to do it; it assuages my guilt over throwing out all that plastic up until now.

Oh, and the reason that this great service is now being offered? The rising price of oil has made the price of recycling the more difficult to recycle plastics (#3-#7) more economically viable. See? And you thought there wasn't an upside to $4.00 a gallon gas...

image from here, recycling symbol from here

New post below old post

I finished a post on milkweed, but it's below my latest post, so scroll

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Busy, good

Things have been busy but good lately. I've been occupied at work with a number of things, and keeping busy at home. I posted a little while ago about how good it was to be in the middle of a good book, which I found (it's a mystery - genre, that is) and I think has been occupying me to the exclusion of writing posts. But I'm working on a plant post which I hope to finish tonight.

I've been getting ready to travel next week to a conference. The Evolution Meetings is a conference of several scientific societies and the stuff that's presented there always seems to jibe most with my interests. I'm presenting a poster called, "Genetics of Culex pipiens complex subspecies and their hybrids along a transect". That's the shortened version, if you can believe it. The poster looks great (imo) and after showing it to the boss, I'll get it printed.

We've also stumbled upon another incidence of hybridization that is interesting because it's assumed in entomological circles that the two species in question don't hybridize. Initially we thought the evidence was a result of contamination, but it now that we've looked for more of it, there's something going on. My coworker who is on leave was supposed to be the one investigating this one, but it looks like I'll be doing it instead. It's an exciting research question, and I'll get more experience cloning and sequencing bits of DNA, so that's good.

I'm also (finally!) moving across the hall into some new lab space today. Whoo-hoo!! No more sharing the placemat-sized space among three people. I'm sure there will be stuff that comes up in terms of what goes where and who gets what, but I'm really looking forward to working in the new space.

I'll be staying with my brother while at the conference, and it is always nice to be the happy beneficiary of their hospitality.

Plant of the week - Milkweeds (Asclepias)

I thought I'd start a feature where I could post some cool stuff about plants. Let's start with the milkweeds, in the genus Asclepias, and the namesake of the family Asclepiadaceae. There are 75 species of milkweed in the US, and the genus is distributed throughout. The common name comes from the milky sap, which contains several chemicals that are toxic to many herbivorous insects and can cause contact dermatitis if it gets on your skin.

Members of this genus are famous in that they are the sole food of the Monarch caterpillar (Danaus plexippus), which probably merits a post by itself, given its hefty migration. The caterpillars feed exclusively on the leaves of milkweed, and this confers toxicity to the individual through subsequent stages of its life cycle. I can remember learning about this in school and seeing a video clip of naive blue jays being offered monarchs, eating, vomiting, and then being offered a Viceroy butterfly, which is a mimic. Those savvy jays declined anything that looked like a monarch, thus showing us how mimicry works in nature.

The flowers are attractive to many pollinators, but this genus has an unusual pollination mechanism that favor certain sized pollinators. The flowers are unusual in appearance because they have an extra whorl of parts in addition to the usual four (sepals, petals, stamen, pistil) called the corona. Here's a page that I got these flower pictures from. Tucked inside each flower is a small black structure that is attached to something called a pollinarium (plural pollinaria). The pollinarium is the jackpot of pollen. It is a large amount of pollen in one neat package.

This is so cool. The pollinating insect, while moving around the flower looking for nectar, hooks a foot around the pollinarium and, if conditions are right, pulls the entire structure out of the flower. Upon removal, the pollinarium starts to dry, and the arms holding the packets of pollen, called translator arms, reorient themselves such that, you guessed it, when the insect lands on another (hopefully) milkweed flower, the pollinarium is inserted into the proper place on the new flower.

The fluff on attached to the seeds is an effective dispersal mechanism that helps spread offspring away from their parent plants, presumably to reduce competition. It is as good or better than down as an insulator.

A nice gallery of eastern US species can be found here.

Blue jay pic from here. Pollinarium from here. Pink flower pic from here. Orange ones from here.

Post Secret

Have you seen Post Secret? It's a site for a project by Frank Warren, who started it by handing out blank postcards that people could put their secrets on and then send to him. It has grown into a community art project with thousands of postcards.

He has the website, has put out a few books of the postcards, and tours with some of the cards. Some are funny, some are sad and some are thought provoking. They update the website Sunday mornings.

Horse Racing?

The Belmont Stakes are today, in a few hours. Horse racing wasn't even on my radar before I met CB, who is a fan. I have since learned a bit (a very little bit) about it, and it strikes me as a unique sport/past time/spectacle.

First, there's the wagering. It's such an integral part of it, that the odds are given for who is likely to win the race, and people of course can bet on it. While people bet on all sorts of things, not the least of which are sporting events, you don't see the odds posted at a Rockies game (hint: don't bet on them to win. Not lately anyway...).

Then there's the money that is poured into these animals. Some really high end horses are owned by groups of people. Last I heard, Big Brown, who is favored heavily to win today, was worth $60 million. And that's not going to come from his work on the track. No, he will be much more valuable in a futures game with his gametes, that is he'll work as a stud. His owners may chose not to let him fulfill his potential as a racing horse, as he could hurt himself and not fulfill his mandate as a passer-on of lightening-fast genes.

Finally, there's the element of luck. For something that so much money is riding on, luck, to my eyes, plays a disproportionate role. There are a lot of horses who "should" win a particular race, but don't for some reason. Bad start, slight lameness, stumble at the wrong time, whatever.

So while I am putting in a few hours at work today to try to knock out the conference poster and square up some preliminary data to show the boss when he comes back on Monday, I'll be excusing myself around 5 pm EST and finding a TV that's showing the race.

image: Coglianese Photos

UPDATE: Big Brown, for some reason, came in dead last today. This is what I mean by that luck thing. No good reason given yet for why he ran out of gas, but there won't be a Triple Crown winner this year.

Conference, part 2

Well, I've just come back from the final dinner of the conference. I wanted to go because they scheduled David Quammen to speak. He's a scientific journalist who recently had a piece in Harper's on Tasmanian Devils and the cancer that threatens to wipe them out. Here's a link to the Science Daily story about it. It's a transmissible form of cancer that is spread by normal scuffles and physical contact. It's highly aggressive and animals live for about 90 days after they are infected. Up to 50% of populations are infected.

Unfortunately, plans changed and he instead spoke about the importance of the work people were doing who attended the conference and the need for that information to be disseminated to the public. Very true. As an example of the public's scientific illiteracy, he told a story about how he was talking about Ebola virus and at the end of it, someone commented "yeah, and that's found in spinach!" Um, that would be E. coli... There's a lot of work to do.

His point was that one of the ways information gets from scientists to the public is through journalists and the media. He urged the audience to not reject requests for information from the media, saying that it's common for people to fear being misquoted (or just plain getting it wrong), but that they normally have a chance to fact check before the piece goes to press. I think his point is well taken. There is a phenomenal amount of research being conducted on more things than we can imagine, and the basic ideas can be explained in plain english.

I'm all for scientific literacy, and I also believe that Americans in general want to be informed, they just get fed so much stuff, it's hard to discriminate. I don't have an answer for that, but if reputable publications make an effort to at least talk about findings of interest to the public, it would be a big help. I also think science writers might be able to put the information into context (so important) and that could make it more relevant.

For example, I was talking to a dog park friend this afternoon and she was describing work her sister does, looking at depletion of minerals in soil in poor countries. Blah, blah, yawn - until it's put into the context that these minerals are micronutrients that aren't getting to the people who need them, and it becomes a public health issue.

So, I think Quammen has an excellent point. A vast amount of science happens without the world ever knowing about it. I was amazed at all the facets of infectious disease ecology that came up just at this little two day conference. The media can do better at, as Quammen said, "connecting the dots" for the public, who should know more about topics that affect their lives.

Amazing Iceberg Shots

Antarctic icebergs - several flavors now available! Hope CB gets to see these when he takes a tour group down under in November.

All pics from the Daily Mail's website.

Conference #1

I'm attending a conference this week at the request of my boss, who is out of town doing fieldwork. It's on the ecology and evolution of infectious disease and so far it's been moderately interesting, but what it's really done is to get me excited about the next conference I'm going to in a couple of weeks, the Evolution meetings in MN.

What I mean is that I realized today how I missed that energy of being at a conference. How discussion (when it isn't an attack, as occasionally happens) occurs at the end of talks and people have ideas and share new ways of looking at data, it's one of the best parts about doing science, in my opinion.

I'm in the throes of making a poster to present at the conference. I chose a poster partly because I hadn't done one for a while, and also because it gave me more control over when I would present. I'm presenting my research on the genetic characterization of two subspecies of mosquito and their hybrids along a transect.

I like the Evolution meetings because I find their content most in line with my own research interests. Does that make me an evolutionary biologist? I suppose maybe. I'm interested in hybridization, adaptation and population dynamics, so it fits.

And I had the realization lately that these processes are what interest me, so I'm not going to get hung up on not being able to work with plants right now. The mosquitoes are a good model organism for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that no one cares if you put the extras in the -80 freezer when you're done.

So, I'll post my poster when I'm done with it. I like it so far, but, like my brother said, it always takes longer to make one than you think.

Restroom Wisdom

Saw this on the inside of a bathroom stall today:

"100 things went right today!"

Cool Illusions at Scientific American

Scientific American magazine has an issue called "The Neuroscience of Illusion". It's about how those wacky optical illusions tell scientists about how our brains work.

Here's the link:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-illusion

Indeed, the illusion they show at the beginning of the piece sure looks like it's moving, when it's not. CB bought the issue to show the birders he works with how brightness and color perception are relative. For example, do this one (credit to Edward H. Adelson of MIT):

Look at the squares labeled A and B. Are they different? They sure look different, but, no, they are the same shade of grey. You can print it out and cut out the squares if you like.

I've been thinking about the brain and all the cool gadgets that make up our sensory machinery. Mr W's had a thing lately for the "Magic School Bus" books and videos. We checked out a book on the senses and we read it every night for bedtime stories for almost three weeks. When you think about how sensory input is translated into nerve impulses, it is pretty darn amazing. Especially sight and hearing. Things most of us take for granted are incredibly complicated.

Apparently our visual system is pretty easily fooled, to which the abundance of optical illusions can attest. This is likely because shared networks in the brain. The article says:

But the same neural machinery that interprets actual sensory inputs is also responsible for our dreams, delusions and failings of memory. In other words, the real and the imagined share a physical source in the brain.

No wonder why we sometimes can't believe our eyes. Poking around, I found a contest whose site has lots of good illusions. There are some good blogs too here and here.

Another miss

There was a pivotal day that happened when I was getting divorced. When the first year "anniversary" of this date rolled around, I thought to myself, 'grrr, one year ago today...' (insert anger and sadness here). Then the two year anniversary of that date came up and I thought, 'wow, it's been two years...' (insert annoyance here).

This year, I missed the date entirely. Forgot about it. I realized over the weekend that this day passed about a month ago and I didn't even think about what it "meant".

Misstep or something else?

Well, I finally found out about the postdoc/lab manager job I'd been so excited about. For some reason the professor didn't return my email, but I saw on her website that she had hired someone. I sort of felt like my inquiring about the salary before even scoring an interview was a misstep on my part that may have cost me the position, but I'll never know.

Live and learn.

Do these things "happen for a reason"? I don't really believe that, but I've learned a valuable lesson with regard to the timing of when to talk about money. I also think that opportunities come up for people who are more or less looking for them.

As far as being able to learn the techniques I want to learn, and do the kinds of studies I want to do, my present job offers a lot. Besides being extremely flexible in terms of projects and work hours, it pays well and is reasonably well funded in terms of equipment and supplies. The only downside is that I miss the collaborative aspect of being in academia, but maybe I can find it if I work at it a bit.

This all has me thinking too about what I see myself doing 5 or 10 years down the road. I would like to have more responsibility (with a corresponding hike in pay), and I'd like to get back to working with plants again some day. But the mosquito gig has been good to me and, most importantly, it's what I make it.

Last day of school, another day of work

Today is Mr W's last day of first grade. He's had a good year. A few bumps in the road like many 7 year old boys learning the social skills necessary to get along with people, but overall he's learned a ton. Reading, writing and math.

He'll start summer camp on Monday, at a nice (and expensive) place with a pool and gymnastics classes and a bus for field trips to all the neat kid places in town that I intend to get to but rarely do.

He likes it OK, but would rather hang out at home with me. He's got a friend whose mom doesn't work outside the home, so the kid gets to hang at home this summer. He also has a friend who is being looked after this summer by the teacher from the after-school care (who Mr W loves because Jake lets him play Sonic games on his cell phone thing).

I imagine most families are like me, though. My job happens to be a year-round gig, and work life goes on as usual. I'll take some vacation with Mr W in August, and he'll go to Yellowstone with his dad in July. But largely it'll be like the school schedule without the academic stuff.

This makes me ambivalent. One the one hand, I wish he could just play and play during the summer and enjoy himself. But on the other hand, when I had my summers off, I remember being bored stiff and looked forward to school starting up again. My mom stayed home with us, but we didn't do much in the way of activities beside joining the community pool.

So what's better? Being bored at home or being engaged in activities at camp? If it were me, I guess I'd take the camp gig.

Holy walkin' pterosaurs

The Tetrapod Zoology blog over at Science Blogs has a very cool bit on an article they recently published. As the picture suggests, they did a morphological analysis and conclude that these beasts were more stork-like than, say, hawk like. Apparently they've refuted claims they were skimmer-like (see picture below) as well. "Terrestrial Stalkers" is what the authors called them.

Skimmer image: Sharon Anthony, azhdarchid image: Mark Whitton

Invasive plants attract different pollinators

Invasive plants are one of the byproducts of humans moving around our planet so much. Invasives are an interesting area of research for a couple of reasons. First, most introduced plant species don't end up being all that invasive. They stay relatively well-behaved because they don't find conditions favorable enough to get a toehold and outcompete native vegetation.

Second, those that do end up successful (from their point of view anyway) do so in a several ways. For example, they might be released from an herbivore or from competition from another plant species that's present on their home turf. Or perhaps there's a genotype that happens to be super duper adapted to the habitat in which it has landed. It can also happen that people think the plant makes a great garden plant, and it escapes and becomes a problem, like purple loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria.

And, as unlikely as it may seem (I love how truth can be stranger than fiction sometimes) it could happen that an introduced species crosses with another introduced species of the same genera that's from someplace else and this produces hybrids that are REALLY invasive, which is the case with Salt Cedar (Tamarix sp.) I'll do a whole post on that cool system sometime.

Of course, the effects on the invaded plant communities are varied. A paper recently came out that showed two species of invasive plants with showy, insect-pollinated flowers, Opuntia stricata (a prickly pear cactus) and Carpobrotus affine acinaciformis (a succulent) attracted more pollinators to the area, and thus increased the overall rate of pollination for native species.

So the native plants received some benefit, during this slice of time in the process of the invasion anyway. The study did not show whether this increased attention by pollinators translated into the tangible benefit of higher seed set, or bigger seeds or something like that. However, there were differences in the types of pollinators the invasives attracted. The succulent attracted more generalist pollinators that everyone benefited from, while the cactus had a higher percentage of insects that came in only to pollinate it.

The authors concluded that invasion by the cactus was more detrimental because it could monopolize pollinators, while invasion by the succulent could actually benefit native plants by bringing in generalist pollinators. I think this study is interesting because it shows some of the more subtle effects of non-native plants.

Reference: Bartomeus I., Vila M., Santamaría L. Contrasting effects of invasive plants in plant-pollinator networks. Oecologia 155(4): 761-770

image: Botanic Gardens Trust

Manuscript Limbo, part one million

I think my manuscript is done, except for the abstract, which shouldn't take too long to put together. I can not BELIEVE how long it has taken me, and the extent to which I have felt utterly ineffectual at times during this process. I've had so many final versions, they're numbered now.

The rational part of me wants to think that it's my lack of background in mosquitoes that has made it difficult for me to really put my (if I do say so myself) great results into context. This has led to a dependency on my boss to fill in these gaps, although I have of course learned a lot about mosquitoes so far. I've had to wait for him to do the other things he's got to do, and that has been at times frustrating, although it's not anything he's doing deliberately. I also have to remember that this is only my third manuscript. But that tends to bum me out even more because I feel like I should have published more so far.

But all of the little tweaky changes, it's like herding cats. Oh, I changed this part, now that part doesn't flow so nicely. I redid this table, so now my numbers over here are wonky. Did I take out the extra references I ended up not using? It's like trying to hold a laundry basket full of socks without the basket and with Sally following me, hoping to eat one or more of the socks.

I just hope it gets easier. It hasn't turned me off to the process, but I sure as hell hope the next one is less exhausting.

Big Plant = Little Plant + Time

I made my first trip of the season to the plant nursery yesterday. I like patronizing this place because the owner is involved in our local native plant society. It would not be an underestimation to say I love going to pick out plants to put in the garden. All the choices, and trying to figure out what would do best in the spot and yet not be something I've grown before, unless it has proven to be really good in that spot. Like Verbenas, which have done really well in my garden.

Here's some of what we bought yesterday:

Mr W and I have made our first foray into growing strawberries, and I bought six plants that are supposed to be "ever-bearing", so maybe we'll be able to go out there all summer and discover a choice berry or two that the squirrels and birds haven't found yet. Thankfully, the neighbors have lots of strawberry plants, so maybe the critters won't focus on ours entirely.

We also bought the requisite kid vegetable, a pumpkin vine. It's fun for a kid (and his mom) to watch the progress of this fast-growing plant, and we'll hopefully score a couple of Halloween pumpkins out of it as well.

All this was fun, and I feel like I got a good value for the price I paid, but when I looked to buy some perennials, I was dismayed to see that most of the ones for sunny spots were sold in 1 gallon pots. Here's where the title of the post comes in. I can buy three different plants for $9 when they come in 2" pots, but a plant in a one gallon pot costs $9! Now, it's probably true that the bigger plants survive better and the nursery sees fewer returns (I'm guessing). But even a mildly competent gardener like myself can get a smaller plant to establish with minimal care.

So, what to do? I'll go to another place to see if I can get a better price on a smaller plant. But it gives me an excuse to peruse another nursery, so it's not all bad.

image: agmedia.com