Yesterday, the graduating masters students in my department presented on their theses. I’m really proud of all of them and wish them luck in their future endeavors! We’ve had a kick butt 2 year run here, and we all deserve some fun now!


Here are the topics they studied:

• Use of microsatellites to classify individuals by relatedness in introduced populations of the small Indian mongoose (Herpestes javanicus) in Jamaica
• Present and past CO2 concentration patterns from an urban to rural gradient
• Molecular barcoding of endangered turtles
• Effects of climate change on bobcats (Lynx rufus) in the Northern Rockies
• An assessment of habitat connectivity for brown bears (Ursus arctos) in Central Italy
• Small mammal response to oak loss
• Assessing and mitigating the demographic impacts of bycatch mortatily of endangered loggerhead turtles in Baja California Sur, Mexico
• Learning and experiencing 6th grade science on a green roof
• Dietary partitioning between three sympatric species coyote (Canis latrans), red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) in New York
• Assessing fruit availability for blue monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis) in Kakamega, Kenya
• The population dynamics of a threatened beach plant, Amaranthus pumilus

I enjoyed all of the presentations! It was nice to see the fruits of all the labor.


I recorded the audio of all the presentations if anyone is interested in hearing the talks. You can shoot me an email and I can see if I can get the file to you. Unfortunately, it might not make a whole lot of sense without seeing some of the slides.


Congratulations to everyone! You did a great job!

As part of Columbia University’s Darwin Speaker Series, Rosemary Grant of Princeton University came to speak on April 14th, 2009 about evolution in Darwin’s finches.


This year being the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, and the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, it was fitting for Rosemary Grant to speak about her research on the island Daphne in the Galapagos Islands. The finches have radiated into over a dozen diagnosable species, some that share habitats and some living alone on their islands. The islands are so isolated that migrations are rare, but when they do occur, researchers are there to observe the events.

Rosemary is an interesting woman, and her husband and research partner, Peter, an interesting man. People may unknowingly assume they are a typical cute older couple when passing them on the street. But what they have seen during their years of research on a few small islands may surpass in scope anything we may hope to witness in any one of our lifetimes.

Over the past several years, Rosemary and Peter Grant have observed shifts in beak size and as well as instances of hybridization and a possible trend of introgression between 2 species. A hot topic that an outsider may not realize is that there is no “definition” of what is a species. Search on the internet for “species concept” and you will find over 100 million hits.

In her talk, Rosemary Grant do not specify a species concept, but do distinguish that there are points first where lineages are diagnosably different and then where they are no longer capable of interbreeding. This all occurs over evolutionary time, but the Grants have been able to observe some changes that suggest that episodic introgression is occurring where pre-mating barriers such as mating songs (learned behavior) and morphological differences (genetic) may be overcome.

Hybridization and introgression seem to be very important processes for speciation and other evolutionary processes. Another one of the main ideas from the lecture is that conservation is not simply about conserving a species. Rosemary put up two quotes at the end of her talk that represent this notion:

“Neither species nor environment are static entities. They’re dynamic and they are constantly changing.”

“To conserve species and their environment, we must keep them both capable of further change.”

Surely other researchers will continue the Grants’ work in the Galapagos. However, it still seems that the general public would not be able to understand how these studies are important to their daily lives. Conservation of natural ecological processes and functionally important species will be important in the future for conservation of ecosystems, and on the larger scale the biosphere. If there comes a day that the world’s ecosystems are so degraded that resources are being depleted in every way, then our human existence will be under threat (much like what I discussed in an earlier post).


Conservation biologists are often mistaken as simply being animal-lovers and tree-huggers with graduate degrees. Their work truly is much, much larger than that. With more communication of interesting work such as Rosemary Grant’s, and getting more opportunities for the general public to be exposed to the people doing the work, we may be able to bridge some of that gap.






Image credit (in order of appearance):

http://www.rphs.devisland.net/johnna_nicole/Images/Galapagos-bartolome-island.jpg

http://www.galapagosonline.com/Islands/islands/Daphne/daphne.jpg

http://people.rit.edu/rhrsbi/GalapagosPages/Pictures/LandBirds/FinchTypes.jpeg