Awards and Presentations

Tobias Baskin, Curator of Living Plants, received the Jeanette Siron Pelton Award.  For outstanding contributions in the field of experimental plant morphology, this award is funded by the Conservation and Research Foundation and administered by the Botanical Society of America. This prestigious award comes with an invitation to give a plenary talk at next year's BSA annual meeting in addition to a cash prize.
     Baskin , additionally, recently received a grant for $360,000 from the division of energy biosciences of the Department of Energy to continue his research on cellulose and the control of growth anisotropy. This three-year grant's major research objective is to understand plant morphogenesis. Plants build organs with recognizable forms but it is not understood how these forms are specified. Baskin's research focuses on the role of the cell wall in general and of cellulose microfibrils in specific. Plants change shape by controlling the expansion of their walls. If they expanded the same amount in all directions, expansion would be isotropic and all plants would look like grapes, that is spherical. To build forms with asymmetric shapes, expansion in different directions must differ, that is be aniostropic. The anisotropy of expansion is known to be dictated by cellulose but the details remain obscure and Baskin's lab's research is trying to figure this out. The DOE is interested, in addition to the basic research importance, because celluose is the major component of any possible biofuel and because the plant cell wall is a nano-structured material and knowledge of its behavior may guide attempts to make bio-mimetic materials.  

     NHC Director Peg Riley has been invited to speak about the species concept at the 2006 Lake Arrowhead Genomics Conference in Los Angeles .  Her seminar is entitled “Phylogenetics, genomics and the microbial species concept”.
     Riley has also been invited to join the Biological and Environmental Research AdvisoryCommittee for the Department of Energy.  The BERAC helps determine the funding priorities and success of the DOE’s biological and environmental research portfolio.
     Riley  attended an American Academy of Microbiology colloquium Washington on September 27 and 28 on Genomics and Global Pathogens. The colloquium dealt with the tricky issues of how bacterial and archaeal species are defined in this age of genome sequencing with a focus on the genomics of global pathogens.

 

Students

The Natural History Collections group is proud of the financial support it is able to afford students involved in collections-based research and study. Graduate and undergraduate students, work-study employees, masters and doctoral degree candidates have benefitted. Their efforts range from renewing labels and fluid in the collections room, to feeding the living animals, to doctoral dissertation research.  Last year student support amounted to 43% of our budget. During the coming year we have a goal of 50%.

 Four graduate students were recipents of scholarships for the summer of 2006 thanks in part to Natural History Collections scholarships from the Jane Hallenbeck Bemis Endowment for Research in Natural History.

     Sharlene Santana, graduate student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology spent two months in Venezuela this summer, conducting field research. The main objectives of this field season were to collect bite force, morphological and feeding behavior data of several leaf-nosed bat species (family Phyllostomidae), fruit and insect hardness data, and to bring back preserved specimens for further morphological studies here at UMass. Most of the field sites were located in Merida state, in the Andes cordillera, and in Venezuelan western savannahs. A total of 45 specimens belonging to 16 species of phyllostomid bats were brought to UMass and will soon be entered into the Mammal Collection.
      Santana also received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). The fellowship provides funding for a minimum of two months of field work at STRI’s field station at Bocas del Toro, on theCaribbean coast of Panamanian isthmus. Sharlene, a student in Betsy Dumont's lab, will be collecting data for her thesis on the morphological and behavioral changes associated with the evolution of novel trophic adaptations among New World leaf-nosed bats.

      Marina Blanco, PhD candidate of Laurie Godfrey, Anthropology, was another recipient of a summer scholarship from NHC. During the summer 2006, she worked at the Anthropometric Laboratory in the Anthropology Department updating the extensive primate dental cast collection, relabeling and placing in individual boxes dental molds pertaining to living strepsirrhines (more than 760 molds). Many of them were accessed for the first time in our collection, increasing the total number of primate dental specimens to over 1390.
     Blanco also updated the Anthropometrics Lab web site including pertinent information about the collection to make it available for students and researchers and briefly described the kind of dental analysis conducted in the lab.
      As part of an ongoing project related to her dissertation research, all mandibular molds belonging to Cheirogaleus species (dwarf lemurs, n=32) either from Museum collections or live-trapped from Ranomafana National Park, southeastern Madagascar, were scanned and casts were made of them.

     Mike Jones, OEB graduate student, received a Bemis Scholarship for his study, “Ecology of wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) in Massachusetts”. His advisor for this project is Alan Richmond, Curator of Herpetology. In cooperation with the UMass Computer Science Department, Mike deployed a fleet of solar-powered GPS equipped wood turtles, increasing the resolution of tracking and interpreting their behaviors, interactions, and movements. This technology has the potential to significantly change the way wildlife studies are conducted, but the development process is time-consuming
     Jones additionally expanded his field studies to include several different populations of wood turtles from across the Connecticut Valley. He also successfully began testing a predictive stream habitat model built in the spring of 2006.
     During the course of these studies, Mike accumulated more than two dozen biological specimens to be accessioned into the UMass collections (mostly wood turtles). Because wood turtles are protected throughout their range, specimens generally may only be acquired through time-consuming ecology studies and not through systematic collection. These specimens may assist researchers conducting genetic, morphological, or toxicology analyses. 

     Natalia Korobov Taft, OEB graduate student, received a Bemis Scholarship for her study "Comparative study of pectoral fin ray structure within Scorpaeniformes".  Her advisor is Cristina Cox Fernandes, Curator of Fishes. This summer, she was able to survey the morphological characteristics of the pectoral fin in specimens from almost 50 species from the major groups within Order Scorpaeniformes our Natural History Collections.  Her research focuses on the how the behavioral trade-off of substrate contact and open water swimming are reflected in the morphology of these benthic fishes.
     Natalia also collaborated with two geologists, Jacob Benner and Dr. Jack Ridge of Tufts University, to compare fossilized fish trackways from the former Lake Hitchcock Basin with tracks made by living sculpins. Their results have been submitted as an abstract and will be presented in a symposium at the meeting of the Geological Society of America.
     Additionally Taft visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where she discussed phylogeny of Scorpaeniformes with Dr. Leo Smith and consulted their extensive collection of skeletal and clear and stained specimens.
     Planned for this fall are trips to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and experiments on the bending properties of fin rays of the sculpin Myxocephalus octodecimspinosus. The material properties of fin rays are under-studied and important to our understanding about how the pectoral fins of ray-finned fishes function.

 

Courses and Teaching

New courses related to specimen-based studies are in the making.  Peg Riley will offer a  molecular evolution course (Biology 597L) this fall..  A molecular phylogenetics laboratory associated with it is being planned.

       During the summer Collections Manager Kate Doyle coordinated the reorganization of the teaching labs devoted to organismic courses.  Rooms 204, 206, and 303 in Morrill 3 are re-furbished and cleaned out and equipment deployed for the current semester.  In the fall Mammalogy (Biology 548) is being taught in 204.  Schedules and competed moves are continuing to be developed. 

      Anne Walton is teaching Mammalogy (Biology 548) this fall while Betsy Dumont is on fellowship leave. Annie was trained as a vertebrate paleontologist with degrees in geological sciences from Amherst College, the University of Texas, and Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on the evolutionary history of New World rodents. She has worked in the field throughout the U.S., Latin America, and Pakistan.
      It is unusual for Mammalogy students to experience an instructor with Anne's perspective on historical biogeography and the fossil record as well as hands-on experience with molecular systematics. Her approach to the course is to emphasize the biological concepts exemplified by mammals.

 

Activities

Cristina Cox-Fernandes, Curator of Fishes, and Jeff Podos, Curator of Birds, are working this fall in Manaus, Brazil, where they used to live and conduct research before they moved to Amherst. Their base in Manaus is INPA (National Institute of Research in the Amazon (http://www.inpa.gov.br). During their time there, Cristina is doing field work mainly on two islands in the Amazon river, trying to collect species of electric fishes in which she has previously described dimorphic characters. Then she will examine the potential role of steroids in establishing the dimorphism. This work is being done in collaboration with Jeff and her colleague Dr. José Alves-Gomes, who are recording the electric organ discharge (eod) to establish if the eods are also dimorphic. Cristina is also re-organizing the electric fish collection at INPA and training young students on this amazing group of fishes. In addition to that project, Jeff is also working on his publications, advising Brazilian students who are carrying out research projects on birds, conducting pilot studies with his sabbatical sponsor Dr. Mario Cohn-Haft, and also bird-watching when he gets a chance. Cristina sent along some pictures from the field.

Mammal Society meets at UMass:   Betsy Dumont, Curator of Mammals, hosted the 86th annual meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists on the UMass Amherst campus from June 17-21. The Local Committee worked hard to make this a memorable meeting. There were over 450 national and international registrants and a full program of talks, posters and social events. One very special event was a reception in honor of the late Dr. David Klingener
(Klingener Bio). The reception, hosted by the UMass Natural History Collections, was held in the newly renovated Amherst College Museum of Natural History. You can see the meeting website atwww.asm06.org

Film about lampreys:  Ed Klekowski, retired Professor of Biology, in cooperation with AIMS (Academic Instructional Media Services), produced a video about lampreys, "Sea Vampires in the Connecticut ”.  This 13 minute DVD won a Silver Telly Award for educational video production and was mailed last spring to 300 local schools along with his film "Under the Connecticut”. The lamprey film was funded in part by the Jane Hallenbeck Bemis Endowment for Research in Natural History.