Jan. 27 – Melissa
Feb. 3 – Meg
Feb. 10 – Caroline Amber
Feb. 17 – Amber Caroline
Feb. 24 – Van
March 3 – Emilie
March 10 – No meeting (Bob out of town)
March 17 – Caroline
March 24 – No meeting (Spring break)
March 31 – Evan
April 7 – Robyn
April 14 – Allison
April 21 – Bailee
April 28 – Bob Laci
May 5 – Anthony Award ceremony at Kennedy Theatre
Spring Lab Meeting Schedule
Posted in lab
2015 Bodega Bay Workshop in Applied Phylogenetics
Applications for the 2015 Bodega Bay Phylogenetics course are now being accepted (deadline is January 10th). The course provides an in-depth and hands on introduction to statistical phylogenetic and comparative methods. Topics include model selection and inference for phylogeny, divergence times, diversification, species trees, character evolution, and much more.
Please see the workshop page for further instructions or to apply.
Posted in phylogenetics, teaching
On building a small cluster
Upon request from a reader, I just put up a quick post over at treethinkers.org that discusses our lab’s cluster, some general thoughts and pros and cons of doing a self build, versus buying, versus just sticking with shared resources.
Check it out here.
Mochi
Fall Lab Meeting Schedule
- 28 August – Organization
- 4 September – No meeting (field work)
- 11 September – Evan
- 18 September – Open
- 25 September – Amber
- 2 October – Robyn
- 9 October – Emilie
- 16 October – Eli
- 23 October – Bob
- 30 October – Amber
- 6 November – Open
- 13 November – Van
- 20 November – Anthony
- 27 November – No meeting (Thanksgiving)
- 4 December – Caroline
- 11 December – Open
More on microRNAs
Casey Dunn has new commentary up at PNAS on our recently published microRNA paper. Check it out here.
Dunn, CW (2014) Reconsidering the phylogenetic utility of miRNA in animals. PNAS.doi:10.1073/pnas.1413545111.
Hawaii’s Herps
Departing briefly from their normal topics, Hawaii Business magazine published an article this month on herps in Hawaii. It’s a short trivia style article that basically points out the paucity of native reptiles and amphibians in our state and has some input from me.
Edit 9 September 2014: Added a link to the article, now that it’s up on the webpage.
Posted in herps, Natural History
Pond Turtles
(Bio)accumulation blog is doing a nice job of aggregating literature on the Western Pond turtle. A couple of new additions to the list are up, including our recent SNP paper that proposes splitting the Western Pond Turtle into two species.
Hurricanes
Running a research lab in the tropics presents some unique challenges. Over these first few years in Honolulu, this has been a process of discovery that ranges from amusing (geckos invading the office) to annoying (condensation accumulating in computers). We have a new challenge this weekend: Hurricanes (plural).
At present, we have two hurricanes coming our way. The forecast indicates that Hurricane Iselle will hit the Big Island squarely later today and then track toward us on Oahu as a tropical storm early tomorrow morning. Then two days later, Hurricane Julio will track through the Islands (again, hopefully having weakened to a tropical storm). We’ll be keeping a close eye on our backup power for the -80 freezer, and probably just shut down the cluster before closing the lab this evening. Our hope is that Oahu will ‘thread the needle’ with Iselle tracking just south and Julio tracking just north as the forecasts are currently saying is possible, but nevertheless it’s going to be a dicey weekend.
Update from 11 August: Iselle hit the Big Island squarely, causing some damage. This took much of the strength out of the storm, however, and we experienced only a small period of heavy rain and wind on Oahu. Julio is still a hurricane, but turned well north of the islands and missed us completely. Phew!
microRNAs in Phylogenetics
Our paper on the use of microRNAs for phylogenetic inference is out today in the early edition at PNAS. A news story on the paper is also up at Nature, along with a news highlight at PNAS.
Fun fact: The turtle photo in the Nature article is a photo of the actual painted turtle whose genome we sequenced.
Posted in genomics, phylogenetics
Kauai Softshells
We’ve just returned from our fieldwork in Kauai! Bob and I did a very thorough job surveying the island for suitable habitat and existing populations of P. sinensis and P. steindachneri. In fact, we put 741 miles on the rental car! Not too shabby for an island that’s 33 miles across at its widest point. We came armed with 11 chimney traps, but despite all our efforts, we were unable to capture the elusive softshells. Given previous capture rates of the softshells on Kauai, it’s apparent that they’re quite rare. We did obtain some good leads and will be back to Kauai soon to try our luck again. Bob and I were able to catch a few hours of downtime from fieldwork to drive up to Kokee State Park to see Waimea Canyon and the Na Pali Coast. It was a breathtaking view and we were fortunate to see a flock of nene (endemic Hawaiian goose) fly by. Below are a few snapshots of us in action, and a few of the scenery.
