UVM Biology

The Thermofly Project Visits Newport RI

Last week was the final group meeting for the Thermofly project, an NSF-EPSCoR Track-2 multi-institution award that brought geneticists, physiologists, and evolutionary biologists from five universities across four states together to investigate how insects respond to extreme temperatures during their lifetimes and across generations. Members of the Helms Cahan and Lockwood labs, along with brand-new Henderson Fellow Joaquin Nunez, traveled down to Newport Rhode Island to the gorgeous campus of Salve Regina University, home of UVM Biology alum, Dr. Heather Axen, who is a co-PI on the project. We had a great time presenting the results of our work, meeting with our colleagues in person to work on ongoing analyses, and brainstorming future collaborative proposals. The waves and the ice cream were an added bonus!

The spring 2023 Thompson Natural History Collections interns enjoyed a fun and educational field trip to the Redpath Museum at McGill University, along with stops at the Botanical Garden and Insectarium in Montreal. Really highlighted the importance and beauty of biodiversity collections, both living and preserved!

UVM Zoological Collection Museum Day 2022
Sunday, May 1, 11AM-4PM
Are you or your family members interested in natural history? Do you find bugs cool? Would you like to see a bear skeleton up close, listen to underwater whale sounds, try your hand at scientific illustration, or learn about the secret life of parasites?

You can do all that and more at the UVM Thompson Zoological collection's Museum Day 2022, to be held on Sunday, May 1 from 11AM to 4PM at Blundell House (342 S. Prospect St., Burlington), on UVM's Redstone campus. Come and see some of the over 360,000 specimens in our 200-year old collection, collected from locations all over the world.

The event is free, with fun and educational activities for kids 5 and up, and lots to interest guests of all ages. We hope to see you there!

In Memoriam
Charles J. Goodnight
Professor of Biology
1955 – 2020
Dr. Goodnight earned his Ph.D. at one of the most exciting times in the quantitative development of the field of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, which was an exciting place for cutting edge thinkers debating the nature of quantitative genetics, natural selection, and evolutionary change. He was always attracted to underdog theories. He began his life’s work on group selection, the idea that natural selection can promote traits at the level of entire groups in addition to those of individuals, and he contributed significantly to the development of a rigorous theoretical and empirical investigation of this process with research funding from the National Science Foundation. Over the course of his career, he watched as his work contributed to steady and on-going revival of a theory that had been long ignored as “unimportant.”
Charles joined the University of Vermont faculty in 1988 as an Assistant Professor, with promotion to Associate Professor in 1994 and Full Professor in 1999. After nomination by colleagues, he was recognized as a University Scholar in 2002-2003 for sustained excellence in research, creative, and scholarly activities. He was grateful to UVM for giving him the opportunity to pursue his research interests wherever they led. Through his many years at the university, he taught organismal biology, evolution, biostatistics, philosophy of science, and conservation biology to hundreds of students from the introductory to the graduate level. His quantitative skills were formidable, and he enjoyed both proposing contrarian ideas and delving into the mathematical weeds to ascertain their feasibility and importance.
We at the Department of Biology, along with his colleagues near and far, will miss Charles’s kind nature and optimism, his good humor, infectious laugh, and his strong sense of community and fellowship.

Congratulations to all of our graduates: Biology, Biological Sciences, Zoology, Neuroscience, and Environmental Science majors! While we wish we could celebrate with all of you in person, we have put together a website to celebrate virtually and recognize this wonderful accomplishment that you've all achieved.

Department of Biology Class of 2020 The Faculty and Staff of the Department of Biology extends our warmest congratulations to the Class of 2020. With so much turned upside down in our world right now, we wanted to find a way to recognize the accomplishments of our graduates in light of a postponed commencement ceremony. Please browse....

Congratulations to our own Dr. Nick Gotelli who was recently named a 2020 Ecological Society of America Fellow!

UVM Trio Named Ecological Society of America Fellows Three trailblazing University of Vermont professors were named Fellows of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) today for outstanding contributions to the science of ecology.

We could not be more proud of our professors, our teaching assistants, and our students for how smoothly they have transitioned to online learning this week. Here are some tips to help ensure success when learning remotely.

Tips for remote learning or attending school from home during the coronavirus outbreak If your school has closed its doors in the interest of public health-- don't worry! Here's a collection of our best tips for transitioning to attending classes remotely.

Great work from Riley St. Clair on her work with UVM Biology faculty, Dr. Bryan Ballif and Dr. Alicia Ebert. Congrats on making the cover and the pick for the Editor's Choice article!

Alumnus, Riley St. Clair, made the cover of FEBS Letters! Work from her UVM dissertation with Drs. Bryan Ballif and Alicia Ebert was recently published in the journal, and they highlighted the study on the cover of the November 2019 issue.

Origin of a Biologist In her early childhood, biology professor Melissa Pespeni lived on the edge of the sea on the Japanese island of Okinawa. She would walk down to the water with her snorkel, plunge into the waves to catch fish, then take them home to her aquarium.

Diving into research: Course-associated Undergraduate Research Experiences in UVM Biology

Getting a Biology degree means a lot of content: concepts, jargon, formulas, you name it. But actually becoming a biologist requires learning to think creatively and systematically about how to answer questions in a rigorous, objective way. Learning to be a scientist is actually really hard, but is incredibly rewarding. In the last couple of years, our department has launched focused research courses designed to foster both the skills and the excitement for scientific discovery. These "CURE"s, or course-associated undergraduate research experiences, allow students to conduct original research as individuals or in teams, with the goal of publishing their work in scientific journals by the end of the course. The first such paper, on the song repertoire of humpback whales in Costa Rica, has just been published in the Journal of the Acoustic Society of North America:
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5139205

Even more exciting is the gigantic impact that this experience, and instructor Dr. Laura May-Collado, has had on students. Check out the reflections of this year's team that they posted to the CURE blog: http://www.lauramay-collado.com/2019cure-blog

Song structure and singing activity of two separate humpback whales populations wintering off the coast of Caño Island in Costa Rica Central American (CA) and Breeding Stock-G (BSG) humpback whales are known to winter off Caño Island, Costa Rica at different times of the year. To study their singing behavior, autonomous underwat...

Chillin' in the Far North
UVM alum Andrew Nguyen and colleagues have a new paper out in The American Naturalist showing how the eastern woodland ant, Aphaenogaster picea, manages to persist at the very northern edge of their range in central Maine: populations in the coldest places are better able to cope with extreme cold even compared to nearby warmer locations. But this adaptation comes with a cost, because they have lost their ability to dynamically adjust their limits in response to sudden cold snaps.

Trade-Offs in Cold Resistance at the Northern Range Edge of the Common Woodland Ant Aphaenogaster picea (Formicidae) | The American Naturalist: Vol 194, No 6 ORCIDs: Nguyen, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1378-1606; Zitnay, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9230-042X; Ellison, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4151-6081.