LOZIER MOLECULAR ECOLOGY LAB

The lab threw me a surprise b-day party yesterday at lab meeting, and made me a cake. A bumble-log! All made with bee themed ingredients like almonds, honey, and bee pollinated berries. They also made me a cool personalized calendar with pictures of our field sites! Very nice! Thanks guys!

Lee Roop wrote up a very nice article about our bumble bee research on AL.com. The article also does a nice job of highlighting all the great opportunities for research here at UA. I believe he is planning on doing similar stories about other Alabama scientists as a regular article series, so keep an eye out!

Peter Scott, our recently-graduated grad-student and current postdoc in the Shaffer lab at UCLA, recently dropped me a line to tell me his recent paper in Mesoamerican Herpetology (paper here) was the 100th citation to our Journal of Biogeography paper (co-authored by the illustrious Mike Hickerson) on Sasquatch niche modeling (link). Happy 100 Sasquatch, and thanks Peter!

Clare and Rebecca have finally finished processing and pinning up all of the bees collected in two bee bowl surveys at the UA Arboretum from last October and November! It looks like we've got a bunch of different species but things were dominated by what I'm guessing from some cursory identification work is the Halictid Agapostemon virescens (my non-bumble bee ID skills are not great, but I'm working on it!), a very pretty metallic green bee. We plan to do another set of monthly surveys this spring to see how diversity changes over the year.