The newest addition

Way back at the beginning of the year, my frog, Ezi, died. She'd been sick off and on for awhile with some unknown disease, plus anorexia (which is, apparently, a relatively common frog ailment...who knew?!). I held off on getting another non-mammalian pet becuase I was busy with school and then it was field season, and there was no point in getting anoher pet when I was going to be gone off and on for three months.

Field season is done though, and so two weeks ago a friend and I ventured to the local reptile/amphibian pet store to check out the critters. He got some fish, I got...a lizard! Not a frog, I know, but the lizard was too adorable to pass up. The pet store said he was a "Banana Tree Lizard." A google search that evening produced exactly zero results for such an animal, so I had to do some digging. Turns out he is a "Chinese Tree Dragon," which are known by a variety of other "common" names, including the "Banana split mountain lizard." Hybridize those names and you get a Banana Tree Lizard, I guess. Scientific name is Japalura splendida. The lizards are native to the jungles of southwestern China and are insectivores.

My lizard seems to be settling in to his new home pretty well. We're having issues with eating so far, but he got excited by the crickets I brought home last night and scarfed a few of those down. Mealworms work well too, but aren't as exciting. His name is Lorenz (named after Konrad Lorenz, an early ethologist (ie, animal behaviorist), but he goes by Lore for short. (Equally nerdy, I know...)

And here he is!

Rainbow frogs

When we go out into the field to collect frogs, we're actually collecting pairs of frogs as they're mating. We pick them out of the pond, male clinging to the female's back (this is called "amplexus"). Occasionally someone asks if we ever find a male-male pairing or a female-female pairing. The simple answer is "no", we don't. A female-female pairing is extremely unlikely because females use the males' courtship calls to locate them. Females don't do courtship calls, so they wouldn't be able to find each other to pair up. Male-male pairings can be induced by placing two males alone in a container - if another male is there, they'll pair up (don't ask me how they choose who's on top, I have no idea) - but that's an "if all else fails" sort of situation. The closest we've gotten to any sort of queer treefrogs are menage a trois of one female and two males. Presumably a male and female hooked up, and one male was just desperate enough to try to join in.

This is not to say that there are no gay frogs. There are...they just aren't our species.

On a related note, here is a hilarious article about gay animals and religion.

Summer (and a bit of fall)

Contrary to what activity in this blog may suggest, I did survive the summer, relatively intact. I did lose a bit of blood to the several hundred mosquitoes I came into contact with, but other than that I made it. (And no, that number is not an exaggeration. At one point I had 107 bites on my arms and legs. Neck was not included in the total but I'm sure would have added a good 20 more to the count.)

Lab work at the beginning of the summer went well. I completed data collection for the Lombard experiment, began data collection on a second in-lab experiment (which turned out to be more time consuming than previously estimated), and then headed off into the field. Kind of. I was foiled by weather for a good two weeks, and spent the beginning of June sitting in lab hoping the temperature might breach 70 during the day and/or that it might rain. The rest of June and beginning of July was much more "frog friendly." I drove north, south, west, and kind of east, battled mosquitoes and ticks, was freaked out by the glowing eyes of (mostly) harmless deer, listened to raccoons amble by my tent at night, walked across and down part of the Mississippi river, and learned that I never want to live in a tiny rural town, ever. Oh, and I did research.

My goal was to find ponds where my frogs lived, and then collect data related to the frogs and vegetation in the pond, but due to the cool dry start to summer, I mostly only accomplished the pond finding mission, along with some trial runs for data collection. But, now I know where to go, and I have a pretty good idea of how to do things next year.

The rest of the summer (July and August) was spent in lab, staring at sound analysis programs, MS Excel, and various statistical programs. A combination of extreme monotony (sound analysis), confusion and frustration (statistical programs), punctuated by tiny moments of success (nice graphs and coding things correctly in stats programs).

Now school has started back up again and I am forced to drag myself out of bed at 7am three days a week so I can learn more statistics. Two statistics courses (eep), journal club, a couple seminars, proposal writing, plus the usual data analysis and writing of manuscripts occupy my time lately. And tomorrow I start up another experiment. Thus begins Year Two.

No comment...

...on how true this is. ;)

12 hours

Previously, our lab record for the most frogs in one night was 76. That was last year. Last night I got a text that said they got 65 frogs at one pond. That's rather a lot - a good night is usually 20ish pairs. So cool, we'll have plenty of frogs to test, and I can definitely make headway on my experiment. Then this morning I wake up to an email that says we have 101 pairs of frogs. That is a LOT of frogs.

I did indeed make good headway on the Lombard experiment. While I was there between 9am and 9:30 pm (seriously) we got 9 done (bringing this year's total to 10), and I left some undergrads there to keep testing into the night. I need 20 total for this summer, so I should be able to finish tomorrow. W00t!

However, 12+ hours in the lab makes for very long days. I have a short attention span...I don't think I've ever done anything for 12 hours consecutively (except sleep, but that doesn't count.) Right now I am trying to figure out if I'm hyper, from sitting for forever in lab, or exhausted. I'm leaning towards the latter, currently. Also, 12+ hour days require lots of food...

Only one more day of this, yay...

Oh hi

I need to be better about updating this thing. Sorry. I do still exist! Because it is late and I must be in lab early, we're going to do bullet points! (And by bullet points, I mean numbers.)

1. I have been quite successful with grants this year/semester, including one of these nifty things.
2. My waders did not survive the winter. I went out late April in 40 degree weather and discovered I had a leak in my left heal. Pond water is very cold that time of year.
3. I took a bioacoustics course this spring and we got some nice recordings of Western Chorus frogs (Pseudacris triseriata).
4. During one of these recording trips, I spent a rather long time bothering a large toad. Toads are hilarious. They just sit there and make this absurdly long call, over and over, and they don't move if you poke them. So I spent a good twenty minutes poking a toad, watching it try to mount the stick I was poking it with, and poking it's throat pouch to make its call change pitch.
5. I get a field assistant!! She gets here at the beginning of June.
6. Things are mostly set for my field work this summer. Now I just need cooperative frogs so I can finish off my Lombard experiment from last year and I can take off on my frog scouting missions.
7. We got a food processor, so now I can make homemade hummus. (Not frog related, but I'm excited about it.)
8. My fish died. :(
9. I got new waders, but have yet to try them out.
10. I have basically finished one year of grad school. The time went ridiculously fast...for the most part. Now only 4-5 more years to go!!

Positive slope

And the trend continues! DC voted today to recognize gay marriages that were performed elsewhere. W00t! As a friend said, "it's like a wave of gay rights is sweeping the nation." Let's hope it keeps sweeping, particularly in this direction.

Hey

First of all, this has been a pretty good week with much cause to celebrate. First Iowa okays gay marriage on Friday, April 3rd, and today Vermont did too. We're up to four now! (Connecticut and Massachusetts are the other two, for those of you not keeping track.) Now if Minnesota can just get up to speed, I'll really be happy.

In work related news...
1. I have permits! My State Park permit came the other week, adding five more parks to the total I can conduct research in, so I should be good for this summer. Now I have to plan my route and try to figure out when I'm leaving. It's been pretty cold out lately, especially at night, so it's hard to tell when the frogs will start coming out.
2. Despite the gray treefrogs not being out quite yet, the chorus frogs soon will be. I'm taking a grad seminar on bioacoustics this semester, and we're doing a project with them. Said project is yet undecided, but will involve recording and being in a pond. Time to dust off the chest waders and break out the head lamp!
3. Assuming I get accepted, I'm going to Denmark in August for an international PhD course on animal communication. Sweet. Must get passport.
4. This fall/winter's experiment never got finished due to the increased non-responsiveness of the frogs. I only needed one more... We'll start up again with that part in August after the breeding season ends, but I'll be able to get some data during the breeding season as well.
5. Due to #4, I have a lull in research right now. It's nice.

Today I get to learn plant quantification methods. Yay?

Conundrums

I'm currently working on a research permit application for one of the state National Wildlife Refuges. One of the boxes I'm supposed to fill out asks for a map of proposed study sites and/or plot locations. That's dandy, except that I'm asking for the permit so that I can go off-trail in the NWR's to find my frogs and therefore my study sites. I cannot attach a map of my study sites if that is the reason I am asking for the permit. What to do?

Maybe I can find little ponds on Google Earth and sent them screencaps? Woe...

Is that like Platform nine and three-quarters?

I applied to a grant at the end of January, and today just checked the announcement to see when they announce the winner.

It says, "February 29, 2009."

Umm...

Happy Darwin Day!!

It's Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, hurray!!  And this year marks the 150th publishing anniversary of his book The Origin of Species (and the 170th publishing anniversary of The Voyage of the Beagle). 

The Bell Museum at the U of MN is having some special events for Darwin Day, including the opening of a really interesting sounding photography exhibit.  And today my department celebrated by having short Darwin-esque themed presentations during seminar hour.  The seminar was both preceded and succeeded by "fossil cake", which turned out to be chocolate and banana layered cake with nut "fossils."  Apparently the sliced almonds went extinct and never made it to the banana layer...I did not notice this becuase I was far to busy going "CAKE!!!" and shoving it into my mouth to investigate the geology of the cake.  I'm such a horrible scientist...

To paraphrase a friend and fellow EEB student's Facebook status, I hope you all get lots of evolutionary presents under your Darwin Day (phylogenetic) trees. And don't forget to leave out seed for the finches that bring those presents!

Happy Obama day!

I'm not sure I'll get a chance to watch the inauguration tomorrow, despite coverage from 8:30am to 4pm. But between rebroadcasts, the internet, and blog posts, I'm sure I'll see and hear plenty about the festivities.

In other news, spring semester starts tomorrow. I would normally have evolution lab, but thanks to the first week of school, it is canceled. Hurray!

Brrrr

It's cold out. How cold, I cannot say. Vista/my desktop tells me it is -10 F. Google says it is -2 F. This website says it is 0.9 F but the windchill makes it 2 F (what??).

Either way, it's cold outside.

1/10th of the way there!

I have completed the first semester of my graduate school career. Woohoo! Only nine (or more? who knows) semesters to go. It's amazing how quickly the time went by. Sure, some parts draaaaagged and I thought I would never make it to winter break (the NSF fellowship experience comes to mind). But all in all, it was a decent enough semester.

Now I'm spending my time doing productive things like catching up on television shows, watching all the DVD's I got for my birthday and Christmas, hanging out with friends, and eating Christmas cookies. Oh, and playing Spore. I know there have been a lot of negative reviews about the game, but so far, I'm pretty impressed. Yeah, there are things that could be better and things that could change. It took me forever to get out of the "creature" stage (you're basically an animal running around, eating, and mating), and that got a little frustrating. And there's definitely a learning curve. But, no game is perfect, and especially for this nerdy biologist, the fun of running around collecting new body parts to evolve with and trying to ally with other critters far outweighs the negative bits.

For Christmas I also got The Future is Wild (Discovery Channel and Animal Planet). It discusses animals that might exist far into the future (5 million, 100 million, and 200 millions years future) after humans die out from planetary changes and whatnot. For example, marmots might evolve into large rodents capable of surviving an ice age, and wolverines might evolve into a larger sabertoothed version of themselves that preys upon the evolved marmots and other creatures. We don't know that these animals will evolve, but scientists looked climate changes, current species, past species, and evolution, and came up with all these species that could plausibly evolve. One thing bothers me though. All the scientists featured on the show as the experts are male, as is the narrator. I double checked the credits to be sure, and yep, all seven science consultants are white males. There isn't even a racial minority or one female to try to fill some quota. What's up with that, Discovery Channel?? Surely there were some prominent female evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, or natural historians you could have consulted.

What is that bright light up ahead??

The end of the semester is...in sight? Weird. I have surprisingly little to do. Today I turned in my last statistics assignment. Now I only have an essay and two finals left (stats and animal cognition). Oh, and one more journal club meeting. Then I get almost a whole month off to relax (eg, write grant proposals, read lots of papers, and analyze more data). YAY!?!

We interrupt your regular program...

Today, we are going to deviate slightly from the usual biology nerddom to look at two videos.

This first one is about a month old - I meant to post it earlier, but see previous post. But I like it, it's a good message, and so I'm still going to post it. Here you go (it's captioned if you go to the YouTube page and turn them on): Keith Olbermann on Prop 8




This second one is hilarious (but also a good message). And it has that Barney guy in it from "How I met your mother" (alas, no captions): Prop 8 - The Musical

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Slacking...

Actually, not slacking. Well, slacking with the blog posts, but that's only because I've been busy not slacking as much in other areas. Like, you know, minor things like grant proposal writing, statistics homework, weekly essays, data analysis, presentations... You get the idea.

To expand upon the above... I did get the grant proposal in. There were lots of revisions, some banging of head on wall in response to revisions, and many late nights involved. And I might have hit "submit" a mere forty minutes before the deadline. But it got in! Now I get to wait six months for results, by which time I will probably have forgotten about the thing entirely. Or repressed the memory. Something.

As for statistics homework and weekly essays, I have only one or two more statistics problem sets after I turn in tomorrow's, and no more weekly essays for animal cognition (the last one was due today). Granted, I have finals in both classes (ew), but on the plus side, I don't have animal cognition next week, and we're having a pizza party during the last week of class. You are never too old for in-class pizza parties.

Data analysis has progressed nicely. Mostly. I just might have lost an important scrap of paper, and had to remake some sound files and rerun the data (twice), but it all turned out okay in the end. The past week has involved a great deal of math and conversions between things I'm only semi-familiar with, but it's been a good learning experience. Unfortunately, the math resulted in me rejecting the main part of my hypothesis (*sigh*), but the data are interesting nonetheless. All this data analysis led up to today (well, yesterday I guess, since technically it's Wednesday now) when my advisor and I gave a tag-teamed presentation at my alma mater. That went quite well. We were very well recieved, and at least one student is interested in working in our lab for research experience. I'm hoping to recruit some undergrads from St. Kate's to work with me this summer. They get research experience that they can't get at St Kate's, and I get peons. I mean, assistants. Win win.

Tomorrow (er, later today) either 2/4 or 3/4 of my classes and seminars are canceled, so my Thanksgiving break starts at least two hours earlier than I thought it would. Not that I'm a fan of Thanksgiving (don't like turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes...I'm weird, I know), but I am very much a fan of not having to sit through classes at 4 and 5 pm, particularly when four days of sleeping in are so close.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Elevated cortisol levels

Lombard research has been put on the back burner, and all focus is currently on my grant proposal. The research proposal section is lacking, and needs to be much better by Sunday morning, so that I can make a powerpoint about it in the afternoon, because I have concert tickets for the evening. Monday I present my proposal idea to my lab group so they can give feedback before I present the "real thing" to the behavior group on Friday. Oh, and I have to have final drafts of all three essays (personal statement, previous research experience, and research proposal) by Friday. This is more a self/advisor imposed deadline than anything, but it's still a deadline.

My advisor is predicting late nights this week. I am predicting no nights. :( I have homework (a weekly essay and weekly stats homework) to do too. And a committee meeting to prepare for and conduct. I'd like to think it gets better from here, but I don't think it does...

Not fringe science, but almost as cool.

I'm currently involved with my Tuesday obsession (otherwise known as the tv show "Fringe"), so hopefully this post won't be too disjointed.

Research is going very well. Data is mostly analyzed. That was incredibly tedious, but went relatively quickly. I now have lots of graphs. All of them are quite interesting, some more than others. Some are stat sig too...but not necessarily the super interesting ones. I thought they were most stat sig originally - the error bars were ridiculously tiny! - but alas that was only because I didn't calculate the standard error correctly the first time. Oops. But all is well now.

(Sidenote: This is a really creepy show to watch when you're alone in the house.)

I've started a second project, in conjuction with another student in my cohort. Today we made our sound files. It went a lot better than I thought it would. Only a couple of hitches, the main one being my lack of DOS skills. Yes, we have a program that runs in DOS. On the plus side, I can now navigate in it decently.

The other big thing going on is a grant application. Lots of writing and editing and rewriting. And then doing it all over again. Hopefully it will all be worth it, in that I get the grant. But even if I don't, it's at least good experience. (But I'd really like the grant!)

Back to the show...

Woohoo!!

All the raw data has been gathered! Ten frogs, five noise conditions each, three variables per condition. Lots of data. The Excel spreadsheet I have been working in the past however many weeks is over 4 MBs and takes a bit to send via email. I no longer have to deal with quirky software...but as soon as my advisor and I get our baseline amplitude value, I get to do lots of math. (Where is my calculator??) As much as I hate statistics class, I'm kind of hoping that I can do some data analysis in R, at least so I can get some practical application out of it.

Also, I have a computer in my office, finally! I haven't actually used it yet becuase I've been basically living in the lab, but it is there and I plan to utilize it tomorrow.

I'm trying to decide if it would be a good or bad idea to do the same thing for my grant proposal as I want to do for my thesis. The idea is vague right now, but I need something for this grant proposal. It is due in 43 days. I suppose I might as well...I'll at least figure out if I hate the topic or not.

Also - I flipped the title and subtitle for this blog. It was a boring title. It got demoted.