… successfully, of course. Now we just have to turn it into a publication. I always give a short speech during the celebrations afterwards, and the theme was what Brittany, her personality, brought to the research project (Ryan Gregory’s great standard question). She was much too modest when she answered this during her defence, so I answered it for her:
her organizational talents (keeping track of the extensive experiments and field observations, all at the same time)her efficient and hard work (she counted more than 600 samples one summer, compared to my 90+ samples for my entire PhD)her intellectual contributions to her thesis, which looks very straightforward afterward, but it took us many iterations to understand and explain it this clearlyknowing how to handle me (important one!
My old lab space.
New lab space. Much more organized.
H.arcticus for my first LC50.
The box I constructed to control the light for my LC50.
Inside the box.
Doing research in Churchill is not without its perils: sleep deprivation, bugs, road rage, and polar bears. Brittany said it was a slow season so far, but not every bear read the memo: see this CBC article on a polar bear gone wild.
All joking aside, sadly enough when wildlife goes wild, the consequences for the animal in question are much more severe than an embarrassing Youtube video.
From the original CBC article: notice the person behind the rock, a little to the left of the hind legs!
Sunset on the train
First day exploring Bluff A with Celia and Shelley.
Putting the finishing touches on Celia’s mesocosms before we put them in the water.
The final product? Not quite…for some reason they keep sinking. Still troubleshooting.
First day on Bluff D.
Shelley learning how we sample rock pools.
…and of course my first polar bear sighting. Right outside the CNSC.
I recently gave a presentation at the University of Toronto - Mississauga, and that was the perfect opportunity to summarize the research results from our lab in Churchill of the last couple of years. Below you can see the slides of that presentation.
In our lab, we focus mainly on metacommunity dynamics, or how the interactions between dispersal and local environmental processes influence communities in the landscape. Since we are interested in communities in the landscape, we automatically deal with the issue of “scale”. This is one of those very diffuse concepts in ecology, with as many definitions as scientists (temporal, spatial, conceptual, grain, …).
This recent article by Spivak et al. in Freshwater Biology tackles a problem experimentally that is not often studied in ecology: how applicable are the results of small-scale experiments for empirical (and by default large-scale) systems?
Are you intrigued by these snippets?I like statsI dislike learning R results may be meaninglessTedious? Yes. Accurate? Yes Then go over to Amanda's latest blog post.
Mid august, and it is starting to feel like summer is indeed slowly winding down.
Amanda is also feeling signs ofFall in Churchill, and Brittany has just put an update about her first field season up there.