ESA 2013 in Austin, TX

For people who know me well and spend a lot of time with me, they may be continually frustrated by my fascination with insects. I say this because anytime I happen to spot a small critter flying around me or scurrying along the ground I almost always will stop to take a closer look or try to catch it (unless it is of the stinging or biting variety!). The sheer diversity of species, morphology, functions, and adaptations of insects is something I find intriguing, and is why I can see myself using them as my primary study organisms for the rest of my career.

One of the many display cases in the exhibit hall

This past week I was lucky enough to attend the 2013 Meeting of the Entomological Society of America (a conference of insect geeks in plain speak) in Austin, Texas, with my labmate Ganesh and his wife Sara. The main reason we were there was to give a 10 minute presentation of our research to the wider scientific community, and also to attend the talks of other students or researchers which we found to be of interest. There were many interesting talks which I attended, many of which have given me some excellent ideas which I can apply to my own research. There was also an awesome exhibit hall with many companies and organizations presenting. The highlight which everyone was interested in was the Bioquip stall; this had many spectacularly colourful, bizzare, and huge insect specimens for sale (such as the butterflies pictured above), various insect collection devices, and even live hissing cockroaches, scorpions, and tarantulas for sale. As for my own talk, it went pretty well considering it was my first ever presentation at a conference, and I'm looking forward to trying this again. You can see the presentation I gave below:

It was my first time visiting Austin and only my second time in Texas. It definitely seemed like a fun and busy city. It had a lot of restaurants and bars around downtown but also a lot of green space relatively close to the city centre, which was cool. The layout of the city was nice, with the bridge and road of Constitution Ave lining up perfectly with the huge State Capitol, which then backs onto the University of Texas. The campus itself is sprawling, perhaps even larger than LSU's. The football stadium is definitely larger, holding slightly over 100,000 Texas Longhorn fans. We also visited Mount Bonnell, the Austin Botanic Gardens, and Barton Springs pool. It's really just great to be travelling to new places again after a while, as I haven't done it since Alaska.

Downtown Austin

In the botanic gardens

Texas State Capitol

The University of Texas Football Stadium (capacity: 100,000)

On the way to Austin we made a little detour to visit Ganesh’s friend Arjun in Waco, Texas. The city itself was nothing special, but is home to Baylor University, which we went and toured around the morning after arriving. We then drove a couple of hours north to visit Dinosaur Valley State Park which was really cool. There you can see dinosaur footprints probably belonging to the large herbivore Astrodon, and also tracks of the predatory Acrocanthosaurus, a dinosaur similar in function and ferocity to Tyrannasaurus rex. The prints are estimated to be approximately 110 million years old, which is simply amazing! On top of that the area was beautiful, especially because the leaves of trees are changing colour to the browns and reds of autumn. 

Footprint of Acrocanthosaurus

In Dinosaur Valley State Park

November already?!

Since I returned from my trip to Alaska and the Northeast I haven’t posted much in the way of updates to my blog and time has just been flying by. That's mostly because the semester has been an eventful one, full of hard work, new challenges, good times, and great company. Here's a little run down of what's made it so special:

Halloween
Of course, one of the highlights of this time of year in the USA is the craziness which is Halloween. For the third year in a row I headed down to New Orleans to spend the night on Bourbon Street with all the other people in costumes. It's always a lot of fun walking up and down the French Quarter checking out all the crazy costumes people have made or bought - my favourite this year was a long-haired guy dressed as Jesus holding a cask of wine which had this used to be water written on it. We had an awesome night out, trawling the various bars and drinking hand grenades, with the night finally culminating in a photoshoot beside the LSU-coloured Lamborghini in the post prior to this one.

Weddings
I’ve been to a couple of weddings this semester which was really cool as I haven’t been to a whole lot so far in my life. The first was the wedding of my girlfriend’s cousin, which was held in Lafayette, a city in Louisiana about one hour west of Baton Rouge. The second was the wedding of my lab mate and friend Ganesh, to his long-term love Sara, who had finally finished her studies in Sweden and had come to join him in the USA.

They were both really nice occasions, but also couldn’t have been more contrasting in style. The first wedding was pretty much similar in style to that of a New Zealand wedding, with a nice ceremony conducted by a wedding celebrant, followed by a big reception with food, drinks, music, and dancing. Everyone was wearing their number ones and the celebrations carried on well into the night. Ganesh and Sara's wedding was much more low-key and intimate, with a small personal ceremony held at their apartment where they exchanged a few words about one another and presented each other with flower garlands, before everybody present had tikka (red rice paste) placed on their forehead. This was then followed by a delicious dinner at the Baton Rouge Nepalese restaurant.

Tikka on the forehead at Ganesh's wedding

Hiking Trips
During the semester I've somehow found the time to get away on a couple of one-day hiking trips to Fountainbleau State Park in Louisiana and Clark Creek in Mississippi. Fountainbleau State Park is right on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and even has a man-made beach. It has around 12 km of trails, a nice campground, and also a lot of Phragmites where I took a little time to do some data collection. Clark Creek is just over the Louisiana/Mississippi border, close to the Tunica Hills Wildlife Management Area, and it was really nice. We all took lunch and lots of water and hiked for over 6 hours along creek beds, beside waterfalls, and up and down the largest hills you can find this close to Baton Rouge. We saw a few armadillos, some deer, frogs, and lizards, and a baby snake. It was a great place to visit and was definitely a highlight of the semester so far.

Hiking in Mississippi

Large orb-web spider at Fountainbleau State Park

One of the waterfalls at Clark Creek

LSU
Of course, there is always plenty going on at university, with my school commitments again being shared between research, teaching, and coursework. This is basically my last semester of coursework before I can solely focus on my research and teaching. I'm still having a lot of fun teaching the ecology lab class, although this has been a freak semester where I have only had a total of 11 students compared to the usual 24 (hooray for less grading!). One of the projects we conduct with the students even made the Baton Rouge newspaper (http://theadvocate.com/features/people/7470629-123/lsu-students-work-to-keep). Because I've been enjoying my research and time in Louisiana so much I have decided to stay on and finish my PhD. I already have a lot of nice data and am making steady progress towards producing a nice dissertation and a number of scientific papers. Next February I will be sitting the dreaded general examination. This is a comprehensive written and oral exam where your PhD committee members supposedly ruthlessly probe your knowledge of the field of ecology to determine whether you are worthy of becoming a PhD candidate. According to my advisor Jim, it is the last major hurdle before defending your dissertation research. It's time to start studying NOW!

The LSU football team hasn’t been doing so well this year, and have already lost three games. They looked great in their first few games of the season but then lost a couple of close ones before being blown out by the #1 ranked team Alabama over the weekend. Next weekend they have a big game in Tiger Stadium against Texas A & M, who have Johnny Manziel, one of the best and most exciting quarterbacks in College Football. I've only been to one home game this season, but I'll definitely be attending this one!

On a final note, I’m especially proud of my great roommate and friend Darko, who has received an offer for his dream job to work as a petroleum engineer at Shell; it just goes to show that hard work will always be rewarded. He’ll be moving to downtown New Orleans in June next year so many visits to his new apartment will have to be in order!