News	Summer 2006

mammal Society meetings at Umass

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

The American Society of Mammalogists (ASM) was established in 1919 for the purpose of promoting interest in the study of mammals. In addition to being among the most charismatic of animals, mammals are important in many disciplines from paleontology to ecology and evolution. The ASM is currently composed of over 4,500 members, most of whom are professional scientists. Members of the Society have always had a strong interest in the public good, and this is reflected in their involvement in providing information for public policy, resources management, conservation, and education.

 

Conferences, Publications, Events

Karen Searcy, Curator of the Herbarium, was elected President of the New England Botanical Club in April. 

Dr. Searcy will be giving a talk on communities and plants of the Mt. Holyoke Range at Skinner State Park on June 27.  In July she will give a talk at the Berkshire Botanic Garden.

Cristina Cox Fernandes, Curator of Fishes, and Jeff Podos, Curator of Birds will be attending "Evolution 2006" the joint meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists, June 23 to June 27, 2006.
Meeting Website

Drs. Cox Fernandes and Podos will be working at INPA (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia), Manaus, Brazil, for the coming year.

 

KLINGENER BIO AVAILABLE

At the American Society of Mammalogists meeting in June, the reception in honor of the late Professor David Klingener, former president of the Society, featured a biography created by Al Richmond (Klingener Bio).

 

Bemis Scholarships Awarded for Graduate Student Projects

The Natural History Collections has awarded scholarships from the Jane Hallenbeck Bemis Endowment for Research in Natural History to four graduate students for the summer of 2006. 
The recipients were:
      Marina Beatriz Blanco; Laurie Godfrey, supervisor; Anthropology Program; “Building a dental cast database and associated component of the website for the Anthropological Primate Collection”.
      Michael Jones; Paul Sievert, Alan Richmond, supervisors; Wildlife Conservation; “Ecology of Wood Turtles in the Connecticut River Valley”.
      Natalia K. Taft; Cristina Cox Fernandes, supervisor; Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Program; “Com;parative study of pectoral fin ray structure within Scorpaeniformes”.
      Sharlene E. Santana Mata; Elizabeth Dumont, supervisor; Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Program; “The evolution of feeding behavior in bats.

 

Graduate Student Receives STRI Fellowship

Graduate Student Sharlene Santana recently 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 the Caribbean 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.