We have a new paper out in ICB dealing with acclimation of temperate and tropical aquatic insects. We found, as predicted, tropical mayflies were worse at acclimating than their temperate counterparts. But we found no difference between temperate and tropical stoneflies! Our paper was also featured on the ICB blog - check it out!

Thank you to Functional Ecology for choosing our picture for this month's issue! It's a great honor!

This summer my field assistant, Scott Morton, and I began experiments looking at how temperature mediates predator-prey and competitive interactions in aquatic insects. This work is part of the Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant proposal that we were awarded this year. We are collaborating with David Walters at the USGS in Fort Collins for this project. We are now in Ecuador, continuing our experiments in tropical aquatic insect communities. We hope this work sheds more light on elevation range limits of temperate and tropical aquatic insects!  Stay tuned for results!

We found that tropical aquatic insects have narrower thermal breadths than their temperate counterparts. Our findings also suggest that lowland tropical insects may be the most vulnerable to climate change compared to other populations. Take a look at the summary on the Functional Ecology website. Reprints provided upon request.

My fantastic field and lab tech Eva Bacmeister, won first place for her awesome talk on climate variability and swimming performance at the Front Range Student Ecology Symposium held at CSU in February. Eva completed an independent study exploring the effects of temperature on swimming performance in tropical and temperate aquatic insects . She found that tropical insects not only exhibit maximum performance over a narrower range of temperatures than temperate insects, but that they also have greater mortality at extreme (especially high) temperatures. Excellent work, Eva!! 

​Ben Choat worked as my field technician in Colorado and Ecuador. His engineering expertise helped so much with troubleshooting our critical thermal minimum experimental set up. I'm happy to say that he is now a graduate student in CSU's engineering program. Ben will study efficient stormwater management with the hope of providing solutions to developing countries. We expect great things from you, Ben!

After a whirlwind 3 months in the field with our fantastic crew, we sampled populations of the beautiful tailed frog species, Ascaphus montanus and truei, across their range from northern California to northern British Columbia. We experimentally tested thermal tolerance (CTmin and CTmax), thermal performance, and gathered tissue for genomic analyses from over 200 individuals. None of this would have been possible without our stellar, hard working crew Jon Suh, Dalton Oliver, and Leighton King! We are also deeply grateful to all our collaborators in each state and in Vancouver, BC. 

I was selected to be a SoGES Sustainability Leadership Fellow for 2016-2017! The fellowship is modeled after the Leopold Leadership Program to enhance communication skills among scientists whose research pertains to sustainability, climate change, conservation, and other important global issues. This program is also particularly aimed at scientists who wish to bridge the immense gap between scientific research and public understanding of science.   

I will begin a new (side) project with my co-advisor, Chris Funk, looking at variation in thermal adaptation and genomic architecture in tailed frogs (Ascaphus spp.) along their entire known distributional range, from northern California to northern British Columbia. I start fieldwork with my awesome crew on June 25th! If you have a PhD and are interested in this study, Chris is looking for a new genomics post-doc for this project -
(click here for more information).