Celina’s newest paper “Parasitism risk and infection alter host dispersal” published with former UTM undergraduate Salma Diab (ROP) is now available in online ahead-of-print form at the American Naturalist. Great work!

Ilia Ferzoco has been awarded a Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship-Doctoral (CGS D) to support her during her doctoral research.  This is a high honour and a well deserved one!

She has also received a Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research to help her conduct her research on community structure in storm water ponds across a gradient of urbanization.

Well done Ilia!

Dachin and Connor led the research which led to the paper “Effects of inferred gender on patterns of co-authorship in ecology and evolutionary biology publications” (Francis, O’Connor, Koprivnikar, and McCauley) which has been accepted at the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America.  Well done!

Ilia was awarded a grant for $1500 from the Centre for Urban Environments for her research “Impacts of urbanization on freshwater insect metacommunities”.  Well done Ilia!

The past week has been a good one for papers!  We’ve had two papers accepted that we’re really excited to see coming out soon.

The first is a paper from Celina Baines‘ doctoral work “Parasitism risk and infection alter host dispersal” (Baines, Diab, and McCauley) which has been accepted for publication in the American Naturalist.  This paper presents work from a large scale study of dispersal in our experimental ponds at KSR as well as results from experimental work conducted by Celina and an ROP student in the lab, Salma Diab.  This work sheds new light on the complex effects parasites can have on the propensity and capacity of hosts to disperse.

The second paper is one conducted with Denon Start from the Gilbert lab on forces that affect the structure of research labs.  This paper “Gender underlies the formation of STEM research groups” (Start & McCauley) has been accepted at Ecology & Evolution. We found that gender ratios in STEM research groups are strongly affected by who applies to work with PIs of different genders.

Congratulations to Ros Murray and two former undergraduates in the lab, Racquelle Mangahas and Sunada Tah for two papers that were accepted within the last week!

These papers include research Ros has been leading on eco-immunology in aquatic insects and how the ecological context organisms face shapes their immunological response.  Both of the former undergraduates were involved in these projects as part of the 481 research, contributing important data and insights in the work.

The papers are:

*Mangahas, R.S., R.L. Murray*, and S.J. McCauley. Chronic exposure to high concentrations of road salt decreases the immune response of dragonfly larvae. Accepted at: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution *joint first author

Murray, R.L., S. Tah, J. Koprivnikar, L. Rowe, and S.J. McCauley. Exposure to potentially cannibalistic conspecifics induces an increased immune response. Accepted at: Ecological Entomology

Ros has a new paper,  “The role of functional constraints in nonrandom mating patterns for a dance fly with female ornaments”, accepted at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology based on her research on dance fly evolution.

Well done Dr. Murray!

A short summary of this work: Female-specific ornaments are extremely rare.  How and why female ornaments evolve is an outstanding question in evolutionary biology.  In a fly species with multiple female-specific ornaments and unusual non-random mating patterns, we tested to see if females displaying the largest ornaments were too heavy or cumbersome for males to carry during aerial mating.  We collected mating pairs of males and females from the field and measured them for body size, female-ornament size and mass.  While we found no evidence that females with large ornaments are too heavy for small males to carry, we did find that these flies display assortative mating.  We suggest that mate choice is driving the mating patterns observed in these flies.

Celina has been awarded a Diversity & Excellence in Doctoral Research from the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution!  As an award recipient she will be giving a symposium talk at this year’s CSEE meeting.  Nice work Celina!!

Sarah’s newest paper, “The movement responses of three libellulid dragonfly species to open and closed landscape cover” is now published at Insect Conservation and Diversity.  Great work Sarah!

Celina and Ilia’s paper “Phenotype-by-environment interactions influence dispersal” is now available at the Journal of Animal Ecology as an early on-line version.

Sarah French had a paper from her PhD work just accepted at Insect Conservation and Diversity!  This paper (“The movement responses of three libellulid dragonfly species to open and closed landscape cover” French & McCauley) represents a huge project Sarah undertook to address one of the really difficult questions in landscape ecology – how do conditions in the matrix environment affect the movement of animals?  Addressing this question is difficult even in animals that can be tracked with active tags (e.g. satellite or radio tags) but with small insects? It’s almost, but not quite, impossible!  To tackle this question Sarah conducted a massive translocation experiment that moved three species of dragonflies to different conditions within the terrestrial matrix and then followed their flight behaviour.  She found that open environments appear to facilitate the movement of these animals more than forested environments.  This has important implications for the how landscape connectivity between populations of these animals will be affected by forest regrowth which is common in the upper Midwest and Northeast.  Nice work Sarah!