Light Trapping and Alligator Grabbing

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited along on an exciting excursion to a little town called Des Allemands, about 45 minutes southwest of New Orleans. My friend Jordan used to work for the insectarium in The Big Easy and had been asked if he wanted to go on an insect collecting trip they were organising. He asked if it was okay to bring a couple of friends and it wasn't a problem, as it's always fun to have company when out collecting. The exciting thing about this particular trip was that we were going light trapping; this is where you set up a mercury vapour lamp beside a big white sheet at sunset, then sit and watch as a great diversity of weird and wonderful bugs accumulate during the next few hours.

For those wondering, the insects are attracted to the very bright light by mistaking it for the moon, which they use to navigate by keeping it at a consistent angle over one wing or the other. As they fly past the much closer lamp, this angle rapidly changes, eventually causing them to spiral ever inwards to the light.

The sheet covered in bugs

This was my second time out light trapping, having done it once before with Lincoln University back home in New Zealand. But here in Louisiana the insects are larger, more colourful, much more diverse, and more exciting due to the dangers of being stung, bitten, or sprayed with some sort of foul-smelling chemical. It was a lot of fun hanging around at the light and collecting whatever insects people were particularly interested in. We also all learnt a lot, thanks to the organizer Zack, who was an encyclopedia, naming many of the insects we saw to genus or species. 

Grabbed this guy right out of the water (photo: E. Baldwin)

As a distraction to the main goal of observing and collecting cool insects, the land owner Gordon was nice enough to take us out in his boat for a tour of the swamp. For 30 minutes we cruised along the bayous, forever reminded of the presence of the many alligators by the red glow of their eyes reflecting the light of our headlamps. Gordon challenged us to pick up a small alligator (1-2 years old) straight out of the water with our bare hands! He taught us that to do this safely you have to grab them right behind the jaws so they can't twist back to bite you. My heart was pounding as I went in for the grab on my alligator, and it almost got me when I grabbed it slightly too far back. Once caught it was easy to hold, and if you turn them upside down they get dizzy, fall asleep, and you can tickle their belly. We also spotted all sorts of other wildlife including creepy spiders, a green tree snake, and a few different frog species. It was a real privilege to hold a baby alligator and get to go on the trip. On top of all that, I also managed to add a number of really cool specimens to my own personal insect collection.

The bounty from the collecting trip; a collection of beetles, moths, bugs, and a mantispid fly

Life Through A Filter

In my last post, I said the lack of updates is about to come to an end. I've decided to link my Instagram account to the blog in order to create more regular (and shorter) postings. For those not in the know, Instagram is a social media app with the main purpose of sharing photos and short videos with those who follow you, and viewing the photos and videos of those users who you choose to follow. The fun feature which makes Instagram so popular is the ability to edit your photos prior to posting by applying colour filters, contrast, frames, and a other well-designed effects. I started an account on Instagram a few months ago and have since started posting photos a bit more regularly, depicting things from the places I visit, wildlife (mostly insects) I encounter, and experiments I'm working on, to the mundane parts of day-to-day life in Baton Rouge. By linking the two accounts, I'll be more regularly updating the blog with (hopefully) aesthetically pleasing, informative, and interesting photos, and maybe even some videos. Below is a sample of some of the photos I've shared since I signed up for an account to give you an idea of what to expect from future posts. I still intend to write lengthier posts on topics of particular interest, but this new approach will lead to more regular brief updates also.

An experiment recently set up to examine interactions between Phragmites and its soil microbes

A field trip in Jim's boat in a bayou near Lake Pontchartrain 

Hyalopterus pruni aphids on Phragmites

A leaf footed bug (Acanthocephala declivis) in Homochitto State Park, Mississippi

Io moth (Automeris io) caterpillars...

...and the resulting female (top) and male

A banded water snake (Nerodia fasciata) spotted while teaching invasive species ecology at Bluebonnet Swamp

Your daily dose of cuteness from the stray neighbourhood kittens

LSU campus with azaleas in full bloom

Teaching the ecology lab on seed dispersal from four stories up

Scottish band Mogwai came to Baton Rouge and put on a mean show

View down the Hooker Valley from my last trip home - I miss NZ every day

Pavlova I made for my friend's BBQ, another great NZ treat

The General Exam of Dooooooooom

It's been a long while since I posted a blog on here, but that's about to change. This year so far has been intense, hectic, rewarding, and productive. Among the chaos of the spring semester at LSU, I managed to pass the general exam, a major step in pursuit of my PhD degree. As mentioned in a previous post, the general exam is a comprehensive written and oral exam designed to examine a student's knowledge of their respective field in order to ultimately determine whether they're worthy of becoming a PhD candidate.

I was nervous going into the exam. Despite putting a lot of preparation into being ready, I still felt like I knew little more than the basics of the field of ecology. I'd made a checklist of subjects, hypotheses, organisms, statistical methods, journals, current issues in ecology, influential scientists, and LSU faculty I should at least know something about, and I'd managed to tick most of these things off (while still barely scratching the surface). However, one of my PhD committee members had told me, "there's no such thing as an unfair question", which had me wondering whether there was going to be something from out of left field. I'd heard of some crazy general exam questions before, such as one professor at LSU being given a random skull to identify upon walking into their exam (it turned out to be from a bulldog). I don't remember if she answered the question correctly or not, which highlights an important attitude I tried to take in my approach to the exam: it doesn't matter if the final answer to the question is correct or not - what does matter is showing that you can use what you do know to think critically and logically about the question, providing an answer to the best of your knowledge, which will forever be incomplete. 

Two weeks before the oral exam, I received my written questions. These were fairly straightforward and took about 3-4 hours to complete each. My question from Jim (my advisor) was even very helpful in developing the next phase of my research project, which I will blog about at some point in the near future. Then, the day of my oral exam was upon me in an instant and suddenly I was all alone in a room with five professors ready to explore my knowledge until they find weaknesses. But in actual fact, it went much more smoothly than I could have imagined. The first question was one I was expecting, which calmed my nerves, and from there it took only 2 and a half hours until I was done. I didn't get too many crazy questions, but I sure discovered where my strengths and weaknesses lie. My "favourite" question was where one of my committee members thumbed through an entomology book, randomly selecting orders of insects, before asking me for their common name and a to describe a paper I had read where they were the study organism. Of course, the first insect order chosen was the silverfish (Thysanura); seriously, who knows of a study of them off the top of their head? I also remember having to pull together some sort of answer for springtails (Collembola), grasshoppers (Orthoptera), beetles (Coleoptera), thrips (Thysanoptera), and butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera).

So, now I'm a qualified PhD candidate. This means I'm (supposedly) able to read and understand the literature, come up with novel research ideas, design successful experiments, collect, analyse and interpret data, and complete the cycle by adding to the scientific literature through publishing my results. Ultimately, studying for the exam was an intensely rewarding experience and I now feel like I know a little more about the world of ecology.

I really have to express a huge amount of thanks to the awesome support of my friends and family, for keeping my spirits up and accompanying me through the long, tough nights of studying with their words of encouragement, discussions of ecology, and coffee and study snacks.

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

Alaska: Getting There and Research Projects

The ferry journey to Juneau

Because Juneau is only accessible by sea or by air, we took a three day ferry trip through the Inside Passage. The MV Columbia (our home for the next three days) left port under brilliant sunshine from the small city of Bellingham, just south of the Canadian Border. This was the last we would see of the sun for the next three days, with the exception of a few tiny patches of blue sky. The ferry ride was largely uneventful, with the only real excitement being the late night rescue of a fishing boat which had run aground. One of the professors also gave a lecture in the ferry's bar, we saw an old deserted cannery, and stopped off for breakfast one morning in a small touristy town called Ketchikan. As part of the faculty on this trip, we were sleeping cabins. The students on the other hand had to rough it on deck cheers in the open solarium. The scenery all around the ferry was continually awesome, and it reminded me a lot of the Marlborough Sounds back home.

Sunset on the ferry

We finally arrived in Juneau at 7 am on Monday morning, and since then it has been all on! Jenessa, Katherine and I (the three graduate students who are helping out) have been kept pretty busy. We've been teaching and attending lecture classes, driving the students around (to the bar in downtown Juneau on more than one occasion), planning out the activities for each day, and then finally passing out in bed at the end of the day. We haven't had a lot of time off to explore on our own, but it also hasn't all been hard work: The entire group spent Tuesday morning walking around the beach at Sunshine Cove, learning about all the organisms that live there. On Thursday we visited the Alaska State Museum in the morning, and the Alaskan Brewery in the afternoon, both of which were pretty cool. And on Saturday everyone took a two hour walk up to the top of the Mount Roberts Tramway, where we ate some dinner, took in the spectacular views, and then took the tram back down. In all, it has been an amazing experience so far, with plenty more to come!

Mendenhall Glacier from just off the main highway

The salt marsh and beyond from Mt. Roberts

While in Alaska, some of the students are enrolled in a course where they conduct research in the field and lab, and then write a paper based on what they find. My main job as a teaching assistant here in Alaska is to design, organise, and run three of these research projects. I had a lot of fun coming up with the projects by reading various papers and talking with Dr. Bill Stickle, the LSU professor who is in charge of the program here in Alaska. While there isn't enough time to collect publishable data, these projects introduce the students to most basic aspects of conducting ecological research, from getting down and dirty in the field to curating and identifying various organisms, managing data, conducting statistical analyses, and writing up results. Below is a brief outline of each project:

Diversity of Insects Associated with Salt Marsh Plants
The Juneau salt marsh is one of the biggest on the west coast of North America, although it has nothing on the ones on the east coast. Salt marshes generally increase in elevation the further they get away from the ocean and this leads to often obvious zonation of plants. The students sample in 1 m² plots along a gradient from the water's edge to the road which borders the salt marsh, collecting data on soil salinity, moisture, and temperature, the plant species present in each plot (we are preserving specimens for deposition in the LSU herbarium), as well as taking samples of any invertebrates using a sweep net, pitfall traps, and hand collecting. The students will then identify the species present (or at least to family level with the insects), how they are related to one another, the abiotic conditions they tolerate, and how the community changes with elevation in the salt marsh. So far they are having a great time wading around in the marsh, and it has only rained on us a couple of times!

The salt marsh crew

Effects of Marine-Derived Nutrients
Every year, hundreds of thousands of salmon make the journey from the ocean back to Alaskan streams where they hatched. Here, they spawn and then die, their life cycle completed. All these dead salmon and their eggs add a whole lot of nutrients to the water, which also must have an effect on other organisms downstream of the spawning sites. We decided to test this using a simple design: we would sample above the salmon spawning sites (i.e. past a barrier such as a waterfall), within a salmon spawning site, and below the spawning sites (near the mouth of the stream). Data to be collected includes taking water samples to test for nutrient and chlorophyll concentrations, sampling epilithon (the algae and plant material on river stones), and counting the numbers of dead and alive salmon in a 50 m stretch of stream. In one stream sampled so far we estimated there to be over 4500 live salmon in the 50 m stretch. They are so densely abundant you have to watch where you are walking so you don't step on them and you could literally reach into the water and pick them up if you wanted to.

Sheep Creek, one of our amazing field sites

Aquatic Insects as a Food Source for Salmon
The final project the students are working on (and probably my personal favourite) uses the same design and field sites as the marine-derived nutrients project, but the students are examining the effects these nutrients may have on higher trophic levels, in particular the aquatic insects in the streams. Students are sampling aquatic insects using a kick-net and debris bags, and also collecting habitat data such as stream width and depth, number of coarse woody debris, number of deep pools, and amount and type of overhanging vegetation. We have also obtained a permit to trap young fish (hopefully some juvenile salmon) and pump their stomach contents to determine which of the aquatic insects make up the majority of their diet. This will allow us to determine if top-down (the fish predators), bottom-up (nutrients), or environmental (habitat) variables are having a greater effect on insect abundance and diversity. After working at these amazing field sites I wonder why I don't change my PhD to studying aquatic insects in Alaska!

Sampling for aquatic insects

I have a lot more great pictures and a couple of videos from today's adventures which I will post in the next couple of days too!

Snake Venom Self-Immunization

Do not try this at home! Browsing one of my favourite YouTube channels last night I stumbled across this interesting video. It's a documentary about a guy who has regularly injected himself with highly toxic snake venom for over 20 years. While it seems he's lucky to be alive, he claims that the venom has anti-aging and immunological properties, and gives him a burst of energy that lasts up to four days. He certainly doesn't look or act like a 46 year old, and claims he hasn't even had the flu for the last six or so years.

On initial viewing, it seems an incredibly stupid thing to do - handling the snakes the way he does is unbelievably dangerous (although he seems to know what he's doing) and injecting yourself with venom is even dumber - but I think it's very likely there is something to his claims. If ever there is a strong argument for urgent conservation, inventory, and research into biodiversity then this may be an excellent example of it; there are potentially hundreds of cures for major diseases to be found within nature. This is something impossible to put a dollar value on, and something we should be desperate not to lose. After all, these potentially useful biomedical resources are the result of millions of years of evolution, and once gone, may be lost forever.



The YouTube channel the video is from is really good. It is called VICE, and they produce a huge number of short documentaries on a diverse range of topics, ranging from . Here's a link to their main page if you feel like checking them out - VICE.

Insect Taxonomy

This semester I took my final full time class to qualify for the Master's degree at LSU, and it was my favourite class I've taken so far. The class was Insect Taxonomy and taught by Dr. Chris Carlton and Victoria Bayliss. The class material consisted of learning the life history and key characteristics for identification of over 200 total families of beetles, flies, moths and butterflies, bees and wasps, and other insect groups. We also had a lab each week where we put this knowledge into practice by identifying specimens presented to us using dichotomous keys, our notes, pictures in books and on the internet (www.bugguide.net is an excellent resource), and the guide of our teachers.

One of the main requirements of the course was to assemble an insect collection. This needed to include 150 different insect families as well as additional specimens. Unfortunately I wasn't all that stoked with my final collection, which is far from a perfect example as you can see below. However, I enjoyed the course so much I intend to start my own personal collection, while the knowledge of identifying insects I gained from the course will also be immensely important for my research, where I am currently collecting many species of fly, wasp and beetle from inside galls of Phragmites australis, such as the cool-looking beetle and wasp in this post.

My First Publication

As I'm only just beginning an academic career, I only have a couple of publications to my name so far. One of these, the first paper I had published, is particularly important to me. I'm a strong advocate for conservation of rare and endangered species, but in order for conservation and restoration programs to be successful I believe they require one key ingredient: the active involvement of landowners and the general public.

For my Honours degree at Lincoln University I was lucky enough to work with Shireen and Francis Helps, the landowners of a large section of Flea Bay, on Banks Peninsula, New Zealand. As well as being a working sheep farm, the bay is also home to the largest mainland colony of little blue penguins (Eudyptula minor) in New Zealand, with over 1200 nests. However, the Flea Bay penguins are particularly special, as they have a distinctive white edge to their flipper, which is only seen in little blue penguins from Canterbury, New Zealand, and lead to them being given the sub-species name of white-flippered penguins (Eudyptula minor albosignata). There is some confusion as to whether they should be designated a separate subspecies or not, but in either case they remain a unique organism, worthy of conservation efforts.

Whereas many other penguin colonies on Banks Peninsula (and around all Australasia) are in decline, the Flea Bay colony has been increasing in size at a great rate, largely thanks to the many years of dedicated and tireless work by Francis, Shireen, various conservation organisations, and researchers. Over the years they have done some awesome work through trapping predators, building artificial nesting boxes, caring for sick and injured penguins, and monitoring colony size. Every breeding season, Francis consistently visited 50 nest boxes every two to three days (even including Christmas), collecting data on which birds were occupying each nest (he banded each bird for easy identification), and how their nest was doing in terms of breeding success. He was kind enough to give me the 13 years of data he had collected in numerous little notebooks. My job was to put this data into a digital format, and analyse it, with the goal of finding which factors were influencing breeding success in the colony from year to year.

I collected data on trap catch numbers, fisheries catch rates, climatic conditions, nesting box habitat, altitude, distance to sea, and a few other things, using statistical models to examine how closely it was correlated to annual breeding success. As it turns out, the most important indicator of breeding success at Flea Bay is guard period length. This is the period following hatching when at least one of the chick's parents remains to guard the nest while the other seeks food at sea. It is thought that guard period length is largely dependent upon the quantity and quality of food available in the feeding grounds of the colony, and so may be a good indicator of fish stocks in the area.

The Helps also run Pohatu Tours, where you can take an awesome tour of the penguin colony, head on a sea kayaking trip, stay in the farmhouse, and walk portions of the famous Banks Peninsula track. If you ever get the chance, I would highly recommend visiting Flea Bay, or just Banks Peninsula in general.

Here is a link to my paper should you wish to read it: http://www.nzes.org.nz/nzje/new_issues/NZJEcol35_3_199.pdf

White-flippered penguin (Eudyptula minor albosignata) in a nesting box

Hidden Herbivores

When thinking about plant-herbivore interactions, it is important to remember that not all damage caused to plants by herbivorous insects is immediately obvious. In fact, the majority of herbivory on plants (and the most damaging) is often caused by insects which cannot immediately be seen. Many types of insects live almost their entire lives inside a plant, emerging only as adults in order to find a mate. This can result in entire food chains (also involving predators and parasites) being enclosed within a single stem, leaf, or root, and can make them particularly interesting to study due to the closed nature of the system.

Ganesh collecting galled stems at the native Rappahannock River site

In Phragmites australis, some internally feeding insects induce growth abnormalities in the stem, known as galls. Symptoms of galls are easily recognisable in the field (once you know what to look for), characterised by shortening and swelling of the stem near its tip, and the death of the top leaf (see below). During our summer research trips we collected around 100 stems per site, from a variety of both native and invasive Phragmites sites throughout the United States. We kept these stems on ice and once back at LSU stored the stems in a freezer to preserve the insects inside them.

Galled stems being readied for dissection by removing leaf sheaths

Stems were prepared for dissection by removing leaf sheaths and were then dissected using a splitting tool by cutting the stem from the bottom to the top, examining its inner space for any kind of insect or arthropod species. All organisms found were grouped into a particular recognisable taxonomic unit (RTU - visually distinct species) for each site and stored in vials of 96% ethanol for preservation. We also recorded on a data sheet exactly what we found in each stem and any other relevant information.

The dissection station

So over the course of this past semester, Randee (one of the undergraduate students working our lab) and I dissected a total of 2025 stems. It was a lot of repetitive work and hours under the microscope. Each type of insect we found would be given a funny name for future identification such as "narrow white guy", "claw worm", "orange pupae", "emerging wasp", and "boring brown mite", and we also photographed each new type of insect we found. In total we collected around 240 arthropod samples.

Lipara sp. with inquiline

The organisms which actually cause the galls are fly larvae (immature stage) from a genus called Lipara, of which there are a number of species: Lipara pullitarsis, Lipara rufitarsis, Lipara similis, and Lipara lucens). Three of these are established in the United States. Lipara similis is one of these species, and is easy to identify thanks to the dark colouration at both ends of its body (see picture below). Lipara pullitarsis and Lipara rufitarsis are also established (see picture above), but distinguishing between these two species as larvae is very difficult. Larvae of other insect species can also be found living inside the galls with the Lipara. These are commonly known as inquilines, and while some have no negative effects on the Lipara, some can be predatory or parasitic.

Lipara similis

The next step in this project will be to finalise sorting and identification of all of the insects collected. The identification process will be difficult, as it's notoriously hard to identify immature insects. Once identifications are complete, the data can be used to answer a number of interesting ecological questions. Some of the questions we are interested in is how community composition of the galls differs between invasive and native Phragmites, and also how it may vary with latitude. Results will be forthcoming in the next couple of months, and I'm looking forward to seeing if all our hard work collecting and dissecting stems has paid off. For now, enjoy some of the pictures of the hidden herbivores of Phragmites.

Small gall midge (Microlasioptera flexuosa)

Unidentified larvae and possible predator (top of photo)

Nice looking brown spider

A species of wasp pupating inside the stem

Unidentified larvae

Lipara sp. with inquiline pupae

Ecology Lab

This semester I'm teaching ecology lab for the first time since I've been at LSU. It is usually taken in conjunction with the fourth year ecology lecture course, taught by a number of professors (including my advisor, Jim). As a third or fourth year course, this lab is a bit of a step up in conceptual difficulty for the students, as well as requiring a fair amount of work for the minimal credit it is worth. The students have a high workload, with three full lab reports to write, three other assignments, and five quizzes during the semester (which makes a lot of marking for me to do). Still, it would have to be one of the most fun courses for both students and teachers at LSU, especially if you enjoy being outdoors.

The labs are three hours per week and each week has basically a similar structure with a short introductory lecture/discussion with the students before we head out to the field or work in the lab to collect data of some sort. Almost every week we aim to get out doing some sort of field work, as for most biologists (including myself) this is the best part of the job! So far we have been to cemeteries in Baton Rouge, gone fishing at streams on and off campus, been trekking through a swamp, and we will be measuring food web related data from lakes in Baton Rouge and sampling insects from various fields during the rest of the semester.

Seining for minnows at Foster Creek

Golden Silk Spider, or Banana Spider (Nephila clavipes)

So far we have been to a couple of really cool locations. For a lab on population growth we headed north to Port Hudson, an old civil war battle site now used for reenactments. There we sampled minnows in Foster Creek and used the mark-recapture technique to estimate population size. A really nice natural forest surrounded the creek and there was plenty of wildlife to be found. I saw an eastern diamondback rattlesnake, chipmunks, squirrels and a couple of large banana spiders (Nephila clavipes), a species of orb-web spider, the largest spider family on the planet along with tarantulas. The females of these species are around the size of a human hand while the males are tiny in comparison.They look scary, but their bite is harmless - it's the small spiders you really have to watch out for!

The other sweet place we have headed to do field work is the Bluebonnet Swamp, a patch of land in the middle of Baton Rouge which has been retained as a swamp park for recreation, containing walking trails and an education center. During two labs there we helped remove the invasive plant species elephant ear (Colocasia esculenta) from an area of the swamp where it is growing aggressively as part of a community service component of the course. The first week of this lab was made particularly interesting due to a downpour of rain making the swamp a lot more swampy than usual. Some students had more fun than others, with a couple falling into the water thanks to the muddy ground and hidden underwater branches and roots

In the process of passing this course the students get a good footing in a number of topics central to ecology, including population growth, measuring diversity, invasive species, food-web analysis, biogeography, scientific writing, and the all-important use of statistics. It is a really good course, and universities in New Zealand would certainly benefit from including advanced lab courses such as this in their programs, something which is generally lacking. I'm really enjoying the opportunity to teach it, and am looking forward to teaching it for the remainder of my time at LSU.

Students removing invasive elephant ear (Colocasia esculenta) in Bluebonnet Swamp

One of my classes for the semester