This is a re-post of one that Max Lambert and I wrote for the blog “Life in the City: Evolution in an Urbanizing World.” — A variety of species – animals, plants, fungi, microbes – share our cities with us. Some we love, some we hate, and some we hardly notice. Some of these species existed naturally before we built cities. Some were obliterated during urban construction but have since re-entered the city. And others have been purposefully or accidentally introduced by people from all other corners of the Earth. While many – or most – urban species are relatively common, others can be quite r ..read more

Exciting news: Our next paper on the effects of hurricanes on Anoles has just been published in PNAS! Here’s a link to the paper. This study has been on my mind since our first paper about the lizards on Turks and Caicos before and after Hurricane Irma back in 2017. You can see some terrific video about that research here: The initial paper was evidence for natural selection due to hurricanes – the hurricane survivors had larger toepads. It left me with two questions though: the first was what does this short-term selection mean for the next generation of lizards? The second question was is t ..read more

We have a new paper out today from the Greek Island system! As readers know, we’ve been tracking the Aegean Wall lizards introduced to the Greek experimental islets back in 2014. The experimental islets are predator-free, and so the lizard populations have really taken off. With this increase in lizard numbers, we’ve been finding signs of lots of competition (bite scars all over the lizards – see picture below). These conditions are prime for a whole suite of shifts in the lizards. With help from excellent collaborators, Simon Baeckens and José Martín, we’ve taken a look at the chemical signal ..read more

Another postdoc in the Losos lab, Kristin Winchell, just put together a list of online learning resources about lizards sprinkled all around the internet. I want to spread the word by reposting the link here. If you’re looking for classroom activities (or just some cool lizard info) definitely take a look. In particular, there are a few lessons on the list about Anoles in Hurricanes. One of them is hosted through HHMI and is a course activity centered around the supplemental image from my (first) hurricanes paper. There’s another hurricane resource that I had more of a hand in creating. It’s ..read more

Continuing on with the theme of posting lessons from my Conservation Biology class this January, another lesson that turned out to be really effective in Week 1 was centered on reading and presenting data. One of my learning goals for the course was for the students to be able to collect original data, analyze it visually (no statistics, just examining trends), and then present it both orally and in written form. This is a big task in any class – let alone one that only spans four weeks – but the students rose to the challenge admirably. In order to get them ready for collecting and interpreti ..read more

Pre-dendum: I’d originally outlined a series of posts talking about each week’s lecture from my course at Colby College on biodiversity conservation. In the last few weeks though, well, everything’s been turned on its head. My heart goes out to my friends, family members, and the many strangers on the front lines of the struggle against COVID-19. I’m no help in hospitals, but I realized that I have some ready-made classroom activities that might be useful to the teachers and parents looking for ideas for remote classes. I’m going to try to rework some of the posts with that in mind. And maybe ..read more

Last week I was invited to give a seminar at the University of Kansas. I’d never been to Lawrence Kansas but it often comes up in lists of surprisingly excellent places to live. Go figure! That said though I did know all about the KU herpetology collection. It is famously one of the best natural history museum collections of reptiles and amphibians anywhere around. I was looking forward to sharing my research, eager to see the lizard collections, and I had high hopes for meeting new people in the department. The trip was a success across the board. First, the natural history museum. Like all ..read more

This January, I had the the immense good fortune to be invited to teach a “JanPlan” at Colby College, in Waterville Maine. I’d never designed and led a course before, but I knew I wanted to get some teaching experience before becoming a professor. The Colby JanPlan ended up being a perfect opportunity because my NSF funding ended in December, my supervisor at WashU was willing to push back my hiring date to February, and a single, one-month course seemed like a great way to dip a toe into teaching without having to commit to a full semester. Whew, did that ever turn out to be naive… The final ..read more

After a long hiatus through just about all of 2019, I’ve decided it’s time to get back to this blog! There are fun, interesting, and exciting things afoot for this year and I miss the writing. I’m in St. Louis, working in the biology department at Washington University. I’ve just wrapped up the final year of my NSF postdoc working with Jonathan Losos, but I’ll continue working in his lab through the rest of the academic year, ’til I start on a new adventure this summer (more soon on that!). St. Louis was a bit of an adjustment after the year in Paris. That said, there were a number of pleasan ..read more