So proud of the lab’s first MS and BS students graduating this spring!

Joann Jeplawy defended her MS in Environmental Sciences & Policy on The impact of genotypic vs. environmental variation in leaf litter on aquatic community assemblage and decomposition, presented at the Society for Freshwater Science annual meeting, and is off to Denver for paid-post-grad-school employment! It’s going to be a great paper!

Morgan Andrews finished her BS in Environmental Sciences with a Hooper Undergraduate Research Award and a poster presentation at the Society for Freshwater Science on her long list of outside-the-classroom accomplishments, and is headed off to work with the USGS in Washington State. We will miss you Morgan!

So great to see this paper out from Jaime Anaya-Rojas and our collaborators at eawag and the Eizaguirre Lab. A predator’s phenotype affects its trophic impact, but what affects the predator’s phenotype? Gross worms in their eyeballs! Read the paper in Ecology here. Congrats Jaime!

Thrilled to see Moritz Lürig‘s fantastic dissertation work out in the Journal of Animal Ecology (preprint here)! Supported by the ETH center for Adaptation to a Changing Environment and working in the Matthews lab at Eawag (Switzerland), Moritz looked at both diet and stickleback predation as drivers of camouflage on short and long timescales. More work on the fish side of this equation coming in the future!

Congrats Dominik Schmid on your excellent MS work, forthcoming in The American Naturalist. I knew I made all those stickleback babies for a good reason! Dominik found that very recently diverged (<200 yrs) lake and stream sticklebacks already differ in their feeding morphology, and that this translates into different feeding efficiency and selectivity in a diverse zooplankton community, altering ecosystem composition and function. Dominik’s easy-to-understand abstract available here.

Dominik W. Schmid, Matthew D. McGee, Rebecca J. Best, Ole Seehausen, and Blake Matthews (Mar 2019). Rapid divergence of predator functional traits affects prey composition in aquatic communities. The American Naturalist.

 

Come work with us! NAU undergraduates can apply to work on understanding invertebrate communities in climate-stressed ponds via Interns to Scholars (job S19.009).

 

Interested in developing your own research project? Check out the HURA program!

 

So great to work with Hillary Cooper and other folks from the Cottonwood Ecology Group at NAU (Kevin Grady, Jacob Cowan, Gerard Allan, and Tom Whitham) on Hillary’s great new paper about trait plasticity across a steep climate gradient. Check out her final figure about how plasticity could alter how far away in temperature space you can plant a tree and have it thrive!

 

 

Morgan Andrews and Lauren Mason-Sarantopulos are recipients of 2018-2019 Hooper Undergraduate Research Awards (HURAs)! Lauren was also chosen to be a NASA Space Grant Intern. Congrats and here’s to an exciting year of research ahead!

Morgan Andrews: Climate Stressors and the Tolerance of Freshwater Invertebrates Along an Elevational Gradient

Lauren Mason-Sarantopulos: Variation in temperature and nitrate tolerances in native and introduced amphipods of Northern Arizona, Hyalella azteca and Gammarus lacustris

 

Kaitlen Bieber presented her work on the prevalence of different aquatic invertebrate breathing strategies in low vs. high elevation ponds at the NAU UGRADS research symposium today. Terrific job identifying all those bugs and discussing their distribution under climate change, Kaitlen, and have fun on your upcoming international adventures! We look forward to hearing about all your future research adventures.

Joe Sweet presented his work on remote sensing of seasonal water availability in thousands of small stock ponds across northern Arizona at the NAU UGRADS research symposium today. Joe also presented this work at the Arizona Space Grant Statewide Symposium in Tucson earlier this month. Joe did great work all year using Semi-Automatic Classification of multi-spectral Sentinel-2 imagery to figure out when and where aquatic habitats are available across the steep climate and elevation gradients that characterize the Southwest. Thanks NASA Space Grant and collaborator Dr. Dan Buscombe, and congrats Joe! Space Grant Interns are also featured in the student spotlight of NAU News today.