Marmots make Clobert Report!

Marmots make Clobert Report.  It's around 0:50...sadly a predator drone eliminated this important militant leader following his emergence!

MHC art!

Elizabeth Overholser owns property that we study marmots on at the RMBL.  She's also a keen quilter and  wanted to combine her love for quilting and her fondness for marmots.  Amanda's been sequencing some marmot MHC genes and Elizabeth asked for some genetic sequences which she expanded into this lovely quilt!  Our immediate response: how cool!  


Hope you'll enjoy this as much as we do...  

Thanks Elizabeth!

UCLA Science Poster Day 2012!

Today was poster day, and boy did these posters look great! 

The undergraduates in our lab explained their exciting 

new discoveries to the broader UCLA community.

Rachel Stafford-Lewis: 

Proximate mechanisms mediating life history trade-offs in 

facultatively social yellow-bellied marmots

Kathy Nguyen: 

Yellow-bellied marmot call structure is heritable

Lawrance Chung: 

Ontogeny of social partner choice in free-living yellow-bellied marmots

  

Connie Lin: 

Does serotonin modulate social interactions in hermit crabs?

And, last but not least, the "killer" title,

"The Omnivore's dilemma: diet explains variation in roadkill mortality"

By Taylor Cook

There were also members from Barney Schlinger's lab presenting on their research on hormones and genetics in song birds. 

Lots of good questions were asked and new insights were gained...

 

 

Lawrance's poster provoked a lot of positive (affiliative) 

social interactions within his social group...

 But, alas, all good things must come to an end and the poster's came down. Luckily, the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology will have its own showing of these posters tomorrow, so be sure to stop by the Fifteenth Annual Biology Research Symposium - Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at 1:00 - 4:00PM at the UCLA Faculty Center...See you there!

Late snow

Last winter was really mild. Snow arrived mid January and was melted by mid-April. However, the month of May always have some non-expected snowstorm that transform our study in a dreamy land.

Photo by Julien Martin