After a long, long, long journey, I am proud to say the biggest chapter of my PhD dissertation is finally published. Learning how to use complicated metabolic rate equipment, creating an experiment to test hypotheses, and then moving our delicate set up from Colorado to Ecuador and back for 4 years was super tough. I'm so glad to see these data finally published. Tropical mayfly metabolic rates are more sensitive to temperature, but there are no differences between temperate and tropical stonefly sensitivities.

I am excited to announce the publication of this really awesome collaboration among folks at the Woods Lab and some of the biggest thinkers in high elevation stream ecology! Led by graduate student Jackson Birrell, we have compiled a review of the current knowledge about high elevation stream abiotic conditions, their effects on stream insects, and what the future holds for these delicate ecosystems.

Phew. It has been hard to stay positive and focused on work as the world battles with a pandemic and the U.S. struggles with its history of racism. I have been lucky to have a job with flexibility to stay home and continue work. Our field season had to be cut down and we were not able to complete all the tasks we set out for. Still, I am immensely proud of the effort, my undergrad mentees blew me away with their hard work and positive attitude, and we will learn something more about leaf miners and wasps. We raised over 300 moths and wasps pupating on aspen leaves and measured their thermal tolerance. Data will be out soon!

Our paper linking thermal tolerance to gene expression in glacial meltwater stoneflies from the Grand Tetons recently got published in Global Change Biology! This was a co-led project will collaborator Scott Hotaling as well as a fantastic team of scientists studying meltwater stoneflies in the Rockies. Two lines of evidence suggest that Lednia tetonica may not be as much of a cold stenotherm as previously thought. First. they can handle some relatively warm temperatures in the short-term, and second, when in cold water, they produce heat shock proteins (which also indicate stress). ur challenge is now to understand why they are only found in extremely cold water and not elsewhere. 

I'm so thrilled to have our paper called "High elevation insect communities face shifting ecological and evolutionary landscapes" in Current Opinion in Insect Science this month! COVID-19 has meant staying at home with no ability to do research. So, this opinion paper was fun to write with my colleagues, Art Woods, Michael Dillon, and Scott Hotaling.

Check out our new paper on testing the climate variability hypothesis in mitochondrial thermal acclimation of Rocky Mountain mayflies! This work was done in collaboration with Justin Havird at UT- Austin and Adam Chicco at Colorado State U and was included in a special issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - B. We found that at the mitochondrial level, thermal acclimation capacity decreased when acclimated to higher temperatures, but this was less so for low elevation populations that experience higher levels of thermal variation. Still, mitochondrial acclimation appeared to be generally greater than that measured at the whole-organism level suggesting that links between mitochondrial function and higher level phenotypes are complicated. 

Tylor Keeley, my first undergrad mentee in Montana, finished an excellent project measuring flight performance in Lednia that were raised at different temperatures. This marks the first time flight has been measured in an alpine stonefly and Tylor did an incredible job! He found that flight ability declines when stoneflies have been raised at constant high temperatures (13C, 20C), but is retained when stoneflies experience much colder temperatures (1C, 4C, and variable temperatures), which are more similar to their native stream thermal regimes. 

I am honored to have been selected to speak at a symposium called, "Bottom-up and top-down insect foodwebs", chaired by Shannon Murphy at the International Congress of Entomology in Helsinki, Finland! 
Shannon and her colleagues also selected me as 1 of 5 people to receive NSF travel funding for the conference. 
Looking forward to networking with new folks and seeing a new country! Stay tuned for details!

We didn't know how things would turn out, but happily, our long-term thermal exposure project outlasted our worst expectations! This week we celebrate the 30-day mark for testing survival in Lednia in the lab. Lednia have not only survived in our incubators but we have even managed to get flight performance data from ~15 individuals!