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…

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…

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…

After slogging through 5 exams, each two weeks apart, how did Intro Bio students feel about frequent exams?

From Dynamic Ecology by Meghan Duffy, a University of Michigan ecologist and professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology When thinking about how to adjust Intro Bio for the realities of Fall 2020 teaching, we made a few changes to the course. One major change is that the class is now fully flipped…

Sequential hermaphroditism (or why to be wary of frog DNA)

The sixth in a series from the blog Gender and Sexuality in Nature, a 2016 UC Davis course organized by UM EEB alumnus Ash Zemenick (UM EEB B.S. 2011, Ph.D. UC Davis 2017) and Jacob Moore (B.S. University of Washington 2009, Ph.D. UC Davis 2017). Last week, we discussed one type of hermaphroditism: simultaneous (also…

Why are sperm so small? Or, how did anisogamy evolve?

Anisogamous gametes – a very large egg and a very small sperm

The third in a series from the blog Gender and Sexuality in Nature, a 2016 UC Davis course organized by UM EEB alumnus Ash Zemenick (UM EEB B.S. 2011, Ph.D. UC Davis 2017) and Jacob Moore (B.S. University of Washington 2009, Ph.D. UC Davis 2017). During the first week of this course, I jumped at…