Hey everyone! With spring upon us, I’m looking forward to more time spent outdoors and fewer trees falling in my yard. (Really, it’s been a bad late winter for downed trees out here.) Spring, of course, also means opening up the Biological Station Library, and I’ll be packing in the coming weeks to ferry new…
Category: EEBlog
News and notes from your librarian: the “new digital collection!” edition
Hi all! It’s been a little while since my last posting, but I hope to make this a regular thing again in the coming months. To celebrate my return with a bang, it’s my pleasure to unveil the results of a project that I’ve been working on for some time with my Library colleagues, Lara…
Pre-college Ocean Discovery and Science Program (PODS) in The Bahamas
By Katrina Munsterman Earlier this month, I led a 4-day field course for Bahamian high school students to learn how to ask scientific questions, design an experiment, collect field data, and analyze and present their findings. The course was held at Friends of the Environment Research Center in Marsh Harbour, Abaco in The Bahamas. Each…
Weathering the storm
By Katrina Munsterman I am thrilled to finally get started on a social-ecological study aimed to documentways in which people involved in fisheries in The Bahamas respond to multiple shocks,namely a category 5 hurricane and the Covid-19 pandemic. Hurricane Dorian, one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Atlantic, hit TheBahamas on September 1,…
Biological Sciences Building home of architectural marvel
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…
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.…