Our latest field update on politics and pikas http://hadlylab.tumblr.com/post/25379460195/politics-and-pikas
New York Times article on an incident happened during Katie and Liz's trip to Nepal:
Friday, June 22, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
“Wow, this bat has suction cups!” and other field thoughts
Dear SciFund supporters,
I just arrived back to Stanford after three weeks in the field in southern Costa Rica. I was down there learning how to catch bats, collect their parasites and get samples for genetic analysis. This is the first step in my project looking at how roosting behavior in different species of bats affects their exposure to disease and in turn the evolution of their immune genes. (Essentially, I want to know the answer to the question “Does roosting with a lot of other bats mean that you will encounter more disease and evolve in response to that?”)
The field was a great learning experience. We caught over 350 bats in three weeks from tiny 2 inch Myotis (try holding a squirmy thing that doesn’t have a neck!) to Phyllostomus hastatus, a bat that my friend described as “a puppy with wings … that can take your finger off.” (It didn’t.) The most unusual bat? Thyroptera tricolor, a member of the Thyropteridae or "disc wing bats." Yup, those are suction cups on its wings and ankles -- helps it stick in the rolled up leaves it sits in. Cutest? The mother bat carrying its baby. Here I have a picture of a little Uroderma bilobatum mother who was carrying her baby. She's wearing a collar that will help us identify her in the future and allow us to make predictions about how land use change will affect bat populations. Try flying around with something that’s half as long as you are! Quite the superstars, bats.
The bats were fantastic but so were the other wild animals. On a (successful) trip to find a bat cave, we also found the tiny endemic poison dart frog, Oophaga granulifera (shown on my finger for scale). I also ran into other species of frogs, snakes and some birds. Or rather, some birds ran into our nets. Just because you want bats doesn't mean you only ever get bats. One night while processing my field assistant handed me a bag. All he said was "no fear" then added as explanation "un lechuza" which is the Spanish word for owl. Except I didn't know it was "owl" and the closest word I could think of was "lechuga" (lettuce) which left me wondering three things: 1) How did he acquire a head of lettuce in the middle of a coffee field? 2) Why was it in a bag? and 3) Why should I be afraid of it?
In the coming months I will look at genetics of these bats, identifying parasites and trying to figure out how different roosting behaviors and land uses affect parasite loads. Because of your support I am well on my way to learning something important about how behavior mediates disease and evolution. Thank you.
Regards,
Hannah
Friday, February 24, 2012
American Pika
Katie Solari a first year graduate student at Stanford University and Lily Li research assistant at Stanford University
Dear Scifund Supporters,
Thanks to your donations we are moving forward with our Great Basin lagomorph (hare, rabbit and pika) research. We have not been back out into the field yet, but we have been extracting and sequencing DNA from pellets collected over the last few years. We also currently have in the lab the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of Lagomorph bones dating back 7000 years! We have been approved to extract DNA from a select number of teeth and have been successfully sequencing DNA from different rabbit and hare species from the last few thousand years. The combination of the modern genetic data from the pellets and the ancient genetic data from the teeth will allow us to track how lagomorph species genetic diversity has been changing though time. In the next steps of this project we would like to see if any correlations can be drawn between the timing of changes in their distribution and/or genetic diversity and changes in climate. Visualizing how these species’ ranges and genetic diversity was effected by past climate changes will allow us to predict how they may be effected by future climate change and allow us the foresight to structure management plans that will be most effective in their conservation.
Katie and Lily
Dear Scifund Supporters,
Thanks to your donations we are moving forward with our Great Basin lagomorph (hare, rabbit and pika) research. We have not been back out into the field yet, but we have been extracting and sequencing DNA from pellets collected over the last few years. We also currently have in the lab the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of Lagomorph bones dating back 7000 years! We have been approved to extract DNA from a select number of teeth and have been successfully sequencing DNA from different rabbit and hare species from the last few thousand years. The combination of the modern genetic data from the pellets and the ancient genetic data from the teeth will allow us to track how lagomorph species genetic diversity has been changing though time. In the next steps of this project we would like to see if any correlations can be drawn between the timing of changes in their distribution and/or genetic diversity and changes in climate. Visualizing how these species’ ranges and genetic diversity was effected by past climate changes will allow us to predict how they may be effected by future climate change and allow us the foresight to structure management plans that will be most effective in their conservation.
Katie and Lily
Human Impact and Genetic Diversity of Tropical Frogs
Luke Frishkoff
second year graduate student at Stanford University
Dear Scifund Supporters,
I have finished the lab's first foray into understanding how human agricultural expansion in southern Costa Rica has impacted the genetic diversity of tropical frogs. The study is comprised of a genetic comparison of populations of two frog species, one found only in forest and small forest fragments, the other occupying human altered habitats such as coffee plantations and pastures. In ancient times, this landscape was presumably covered primarily with forest (though it is quite possible that agricultural plots established by indigenous groups existed in the landscape prior to Columbus landing in the New World. However, after European colonization of Central America new diseases seem to have decimated the indigenous population, and any large agricultral plots in the area would have been recolonzied by forest). This forest was largely cleared in the mid twentieth century as the region was settled by italian immigrants. We set out to understand two things i) how has genetic diversity been influenced by recent human alteration of this landscape? and ii) what was the frog that currently lives in agriculture doing before the advent of widespread agricultural fields?
We found that despite extensive landscape conversion and forest fragmentation, the forest dependent species still has a great deal of genetic diversity, built up over thousands of years of plentiful habitat. All these frogs are closely related genetically, signaling that prior to the expansion of agriculture these forest denizens acted as one large population. However, the imprint of human landscape modification is present in their genome: Frogs in small forest patches have much less genetic diversity than do frogs in large contiguous forests, signaling that any small degree of migration between these forest fragments is insufficient to prevent inbreeding.
In contrast, the agricultural species as a whole had much lower genetic diversity across the landscape, meaning that in ancient times these frogs were much less common. This makes sense, given that expansion of agricultural habitat that these frogs use occurred relatively recently. Also, unlike the forest species, not all
agriculturally affiliated frogs were closely related, instead two very distantly related groups emerged, and these genetic groups occupy different areas on the landscape. This suggests that over evolutionary time scales these frogs were cut off from one another by some sort of barrier to dispersal, and, interestingly, this barrier was not experienced by the forest dwelling frog.
Luke
second year graduate student at Stanford University
Dear Scifund Supporters,
I have finished the lab's first foray into understanding how human agricultural expansion in southern Costa Rica has impacted the genetic diversity of tropical frogs. The study is comprised of a genetic comparison of populations of two frog species, one found only in forest and small forest fragments, the other occupying human altered habitats such as coffee plantations and pastures. In ancient times, this landscape was presumably covered primarily with forest (though it is quite possible that agricultural plots established by indigenous groups existed in the landscape prior to Columbus landing in the New World. However, after European colonization of Central America new diseases seem to have decimated the indigenous population, and any large agricultral plots in the area would have been recolonzied by forest). This forest was largely cleared in the mid twentieth century as the region was settled by italian immigrants. We set out to understand two things i) how has genetic diversity been influenced by recent human alteration of this landscape? and ii) what was the frog that currently lives in agriculture doing before the advent of widespread agricultural fields?
We found that despite extensive landscape conversion and forest fragmentation, the forest dependent species still has a great deal of genetic diversity, built up over thousands of years of plentiful habitat. All these frogs are closely related genetically, signaling that prior to the expansion of agriculture these forest denizens acted as one large population. However, the imprint of human landscape modification is present in their genome: Frogs in small forest patches have much less genetic diversity than do frogs in large contiguous forests, signaling that any small degree of migration between these forest fragments is insufficient to prevent inbreeding.
In contrast, the agricultural species as a whole had much lower genetic diversity across the landscape, meaning that in ancient times these frogs were much less common. This makes sense, given that expansion of agricultural habitat that these frogs use occurred relatively recently. Also, unlike the forest species, not all
agriculturally affiliated frogs were closely related, instead two very distantly related groups emerged, and these genetic groups occupy different areas on the landscape. This suggests that over evolutionary time scales these frogs were cut off from one another by some sort of barrier to dispersal, and, interestingly, this barrier was not experienced by the forest dwelling frog.
Luke
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