Category Research
Most biologists are excited to share the animals they study with a broad audience. One of the challenges of that engagement is having compelling photographs of your subjects. Over the last several years, I’ve really enjoyed trying to take better pictures…. Continue Reading →
The red-shouldered soapberry bug Jadera haematoloma (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Rhopalidae) is a scentless plant bug native to the US Gulf Coast. It feeds on several native plants of the soapberry family (Sapindaceae) and, since the mid-twentieth century, has adapted to live on the… Continue Reading →
For the last several years, members of my lab and I have been involved in surveying the diversity of bumblebees in and around Maine. I’ve been a volunteer contributor to the Maine Bumblebee Atlas, a citizen science project run by… Continue Reading →
My lab at Colby College has an opening for a postdoc, supported by NSF funding through April 2019. The project takes an integrative set of approaches to examine the developmental mechanisms and evolution of wing polyphenism is soapberry bugs.
What’s with the tents behind the baseball field? These tents contain several colonies of a native bumblebee, Bombus impatiens. These colonies are commercially available for large scale pollination. This summer our lab is investigating the expression of antimicrobial peptides in bumblebees, under… Continue Reading →
The Colby Magazine has broken news that the lab will be supported over the next five years by a grant from NSF. The funds will support work on an integrative investigation of wing polyphenism in the red-shouldered soapberry bug, Jadera haematoloma…. Continue Reading →
This March the lab received a partial renovation, providing us with a dedicated space for insect husbandry, micro-dissection, micro-injection, and photomicroscopy. Our area for molecular biology had always been adjacent to an old “hot lab”–a room used for work with… Continue Reading →
In 2007 I was working on a molecular phylogeny for pest species of the genus Tribolium. Phylogenetics is a set of methods for using information about organisms, like DNA sequences, to decide who is more closely related to whom. In principle, phylogenetic… Continue Reading →