by Emily Laub, University of Michigan Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Student The Biological Sciences Building is home to many fantastic exhibits of mammoth proportions, including a soaring Quetzalcoatlus and a 45 ft long Basilosaurus skeleton vaulted from the ceiling. What visitors might not know is that the BSB is also home to an architectural…
Author: Gail B Kuhnlein
News and notes from your librarian: the waiving edition
by Scott Martin, Biological Sciences Librarian, University of Michigan Library Happy almost-spring! My childhood in Michigan notwithstanding, I’ve never been particularly good with winter, so I’m enjoying the turn of the temperatures towards above-freezing this week. One of my current tasks is pulling together lists of Library reserve items to support the courses at the…
News and notes from your librarian: the “news blast!” edition
by Scott Martin, Biological Sciences Librarian, University of Michigan Library Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had the best possible holiday break, given the circumstances. I mainly spent mine listening to new music, catching up on guitar playing, and ringing in the new year by chopping off my accumulated pandemic hair growth. (In…
Dressing right for the occasion: camouflage in spiders
by Zulay Rodriguez, Frontiers Master’s Student, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (they/them/theirs) Most of us have likely experienced that honest mistake of dressing in a way that makes us feel out of place. Maybe you dressed too formal for a casual outing for friends, or you accidentally wore sweatpants to an event that required slacks. Regardless…
A seagrass field of dreams
by Katrina Munsterman, Ph.D. student in the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab in EEB If you build it, they will come. It all seems so simple. A few years ago, I gifted my dad a wooden bird house, a bag of bird seed, and The Sibley Guide to Birds. Within a few days of placing…
How museum collections can enhance public health
by Lexi Frank, BS EEB, MPH Environmental Health Sciences In a new building on the south side of Ann Arbor, in a white-walled, high-ceilinged room, are hundreds of drawers filled with thousands of dead animals. Why? The Research Museums Center on Varsity Drive houses four large museum collections – anthropological archaeology, botany, paleontology, and zoology.…
Ecology in a box
by Lynn Carpenter, lecturer and advisor for the University of Michigan Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology As with most other faculty last year, I was completely at a loss of how to take my Ecology Lab normally “In-Person” class to online. During a regular term, we go to the botanical gardens for our labs…
News and notes from your librarian: the “going back to campus, campus, campus…” edition
by Scott Martin, Biological Sciences Librarian, University of Michigan Library Welcome back, everyone! And a special greeting to this year’s grad student cohort – I’m looking forward to working with you! For a general introduction to the library, my Canvas orientation course is open for you; you might also want to check out my past…
How to [barely] get started and keep up with a project during a pandemic
by Deise Goncalves, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology I graduated from The University of Texas at Austin Fall 2019 and moved to Ann Arbor in January 2020 to work as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Stephen Smith and Chris Dick. The move was a major change for…
One of these things is not like the other…
From Bug News by Erika Tucker, former Assistant Research Scientist and Collection Manager of Insects, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology One of these things is not like the other … One of these things is just pretending … Can you tell which one is the bee and which on is the bee mimic? This…
Vampire hoards
From Bug News by Erika Tucker, Assistant Research Scientist and Collection Manager of Insects, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Have you been inundated with hoards and hoards of flying, bloodsucking, tiny demons this summer? Yeah, me too 🙁 In case you didn’t guess from the photo header, I’m not talking about actual mythological vampires.…
Learning from history
by Lynn Carpenter, lecturer and advisor for the University of Michigan Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology When I was young, my father was a history teacher. I will admit, I did NOT share his love of history back in the day. He used to tell me “Those who fail to learn from history are…
The future is science communication
by Katrina Munsterman, Ph.D. student in the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab in EEB I always wanted to be an actress, faking illness in dramatic attempts to trade the classroom decorated with construction paper flowers for a day spent counting banana slugs on the mossy floor of a redwood forest. I grew up with a…
News and notes from your librarian: conferencing edition
by Scott Martin, Biological Sciences Librarian, University of Michigan Library Happy almost-solstice, everyone! Hopefully you’re enjoying the wonderfully unpredictable variability of temperature and humidity that summer in Michigan brings. I’ve been enjoying the posts from colleagues about the Brood X emergence in the area; we are cicada-free out here on the Washtenaw/Jackson County border, but…
What we eat plays a huge role in climate change
by Alexa White, U-M EEB graduate student Everyone knows that climate change is going to have major effects on the way we live our daily lives, but have you ever thought about if it will change how we eat? Agriculture is the number three emitter of carbon into the atmosphere. There is a trend of…