Category Archives: fieldwork

Conference catch-up: The many colors of snow

Red snow … watermelon snow … green snow … did you know that snow came in so many different colors? I had never heard of watermelon ice (#🍉❄) until a talk given by Robin Kodner from Western Washington University at … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, citizen science, community ecology, evolution, fieldwork, mating system, microbiology, natural history, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, selection, speciation, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Metabarcoding for every body, every habitat, every time

The immediate reason why I wanted to write about Boosting DNA metabarcoding for biomonitoring with phylogenetic estimation of operational taxonomic units’ ecological profiles is its usefulness for the scientific community and the effort of the authors to make their study reproducible. … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, community, community ecology, DNA barcoding, fieldwork, metagenomics, next generation sequencing, phylogenetics, R | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Field notes from city streets

I spent this morning in Los Angeles city parks, pulling up clover. This attracted less attention than you might expect. Angelenos are, as a group, not inclined to bother people who aren’t doing anyone else any obvious harm, and honestly … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, fieldwork, plants | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

La vie en rouge … l'algue rouge

Best laid plans of a #NewPI … what happens to them? Well, they often get triaged for more urgent things that were triaged earlier for more urgent things that were also triaged even earlier for more urgent things … and … Continue reading

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, blogging, conferences, evolution, fieldwork, haploid-diploid, mating system, natural history, population genetics, selection | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Best practices in sample naming

Wherein I try to save me from myself Let’s imagine a young scientist, bursting to the seems with enthusiasm and schemes to uncover the secrets of the biological world. Everything is new and she learns as she goes! Let’s call … Continue reading

Posted in data archiving, fieldwork, howto, methods | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Diving deep: Exploring microbial communities under the seafloor

As we all sat staring at three large monitors in the front of the room, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Jason hung on to a borehole observatory with one hydraulic arm as the other arm plugged our sampling equipment into … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, community ecology, fieldwork, genomics, metagenomics, microbiology, transcriptomics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

0.80994 leagues under the sea

After a month on the water (and a few weeks getting my land legs again), I’m happily settling back in at home. I just returned from an expedition to a site known as North Pond along the western flank of … Continue reading

Posted in fieldwork, just for fun, microbiology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

We have the technology. Is sequencing getting better, smaller, faster?

Okay, I know some version of the phrase “recent developments in rapid and affordable sequencing have made blah blah blah possible…” is something you’ve probably read 10,000 times. However, third-generation sequencing platforms have turned out to be pretty darn astounding. … Continue reading

Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, fieldwork, genomics, methods, next generation sequencing | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

#Evol2017 catch-up — or remember that time when someone stole your field gear?

To borrow from our lead in paragraph for post-Evol2017 wrap-ups: Two weeks after the closing day of the 2017 Evolution Meetings, the Molecular Ecologists have all dispersed from Portland, though items from the Krueger-Hadfield lab didn’t make the return journey! Still, the conference … Continue reading

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The last of us, Ph.D.

I hear tell that there’s another movie in the Alien franchise in theaters, which makes this a fine opportunity to revisit the beauty and stupidity of the last one, Prometheus. In that previous instalment, we watched people who were, allegedly, … Continue reading

Posted in fieldwork, just for fun, modest proposals | Tagged | 1 Comment