Our unusually warm weather this year brought all sorts of crazy phenomena: massive siphonophore strandings on the coast, Dungeness crab molting frenzies, algal blooms (also some things happened on land maybe?), but it also meant an early arrival of weather we typically don’t get until July 5th, starting during a month locally renamed “Junuary“.
Summer means we grad students don’t get to keep as close of tabs on each other, often heading out to field sites, or into the lab for many hours straight. What are UW Biograds up to this summer?
Octavio Campos: I have already defended, so I have my “D”; now this summer I just have to work on finishing my written dissertation so that I can get my “r” to officially become… a Dr.
Jake Cooper: I’ll be tracking evolution in my simulated populations, some of which can have sex and some of which can’t.
Marie Clifford: This summer I am writing up my paper on floral scent so that the scientific community can WITNESS the convergent chemical evolution between plants with the same pollinator.
Myles Fenske: Many plants require insects to facilitate their lovemaking, I’ll be watching bugs in a windtunnel decide which plants they want to third-wheel for.
Emily Grason: Mud-truckin’ again this summer, this time all over Puget Sound looking [hopefully in vain] for invasive European green crab – Carcinus maenas.
Jared Grummer: I am going to be doing a lot of genomic sequencing of frogs, lizards, and caiman, while writing manuscripts and preparing to be in Argentina for 5 months!
Hilary Hayford: I am sharing everything I know about invertebrates with a dedicated group of students, writing about radio-tracking marine snails, piecing together data on behavior, temperature, and performance to evaluate snail “decision-making,” and letting my bike get some time in the sun.
Eliza Heery: I’m figuring out why sea urchins are currently taking over Seattle and studying the community of worms, clams, snails, and crustaceans that inhabit soft sediment habitats in the urban subtidal.
Yasmeen Hussain: This summer, I’ll be banging on a keyboard and filling glass tubes with charcoal and alcohol. [aaah, science…]
Will King: This summer, I contemplate the metaphorical links between intertidal barnacle zonation on San Juan Island and my ever deepening tan lines.
Alex Lowe: I’m figuring out which marine adhesive is best for gluing oysters (thousands of oysters) to tile.
Brandon Peecook: I’ll be an American in Paris (and Tübingen and Cambridge) scampering around in museum basements before returning to the US of A to dig up some OLD (and hopefully a few new) friends in the Petrified Forest of Arizona. “Je suis un paléontologue, uh huh huh”.
Elli Theobald: I’ll be looking into my crystal ball to look at what flowers will do in the future. I’m taking advantage of the early summer weather to explore what future climate conditions might mean for flowers and pollinators on Mt. Rainier. This summer, flower phenology is already 4-6 weeks earlier than usual, mimicking conditions predicted for the year 2080! Already we are seeing signs of community reassembly that we had predicted from climate models.
Katrina van Raay: This summer, I’ll be evolving virus and bacteria mutants, and taking some breaks from lab to traipse around the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
Lauren Vandepas: I will be alternating between demanding that anemones reveal the secrets of their stinging cell harpoons and trying to watch jellies poop, in between sessions of sitting in an inner tube on a lake wearing a big floppy sun hat.
So that’s the summer life of Biograds in a nutshell. Hope your summer is just as … interesting.
