Lozier Molecular Ecology Lab

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!

The Lozier and Dillon Labs and our research into local adaptation across montane landscapes will be well represented at the upcoming Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in New Orleans this January!
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The following is a writeup by Kennan Oyen, a UWY grad student working with collaborator Michael Dillon and describes some of our integrative aspects of the NSF Mountain Bees project.

I’m Kennan Oyen, A Ph.D. student in Dr. Michael Dillon’s lab. The Dillon Lab has been busy this summer!  Our collaborator Jamie Strange from Utah State and USDA, along with his students, collected wild bumble bee queens (Bombus vosnesenskii) this spring and nested them in the lab.  In May, we received our first batch of hives reared from wild queens collected in Southern California.  With a team of undergraduates and a high school student I have been studying how these bees cope with extreme temperatures.  

We recently wrapped up our first forray into the field for the 2016 season, travelling out west from Alabama to Washington, Oregon, and California. For those interested in what it takes to do bumble bee field work, this picture more or less sums things up. Nets, vials, coolers for storing ice and dry ice to preserve specimens, cooking gear, tents, sleeping bags, and you should be good to go! All this gear does make flying tricky, and since  we need a vehicle when we get out west anyway, we usually just drive. Jason and I have driven back and forth across the country together about 4 times now.​

The Lozier Lab is represented by Jason Jackson and Peter Scott at the Evolution 2016 meetings in Austin, TX.
Jason will be talking some about neutral and adaptative structure among geographic populations of one of our study species, Bombus bifarius, and Peter will be talking about assymmetrical hybrid zones in turtles.