Research Blog

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    July 4 Update and Clara in Spokane

    It’s been over a month since my last update. There haven’t been any major adventures due to time and financial constraints. As I aim to write and finish my dissertation, the time for such outings decreases and thus this summer will be nicknamed “the summer of no fun.” Fun isn’t completely off the table, but the number and scope of such expeditions will be reduced compared to past years. I did have one bit of adventure in June. I traveled to Austin for the 2016 Evolution meeting where I presented some results from our behavioral simulation experiments. With our latest…

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    My Research: What I have been up to

    Last week, the fruits of my last three year’s work has finally come to fruition in the journal PLoS One. The premise is that the personality behavior we call boldness, or the bold-shy continuum, is not only heritable, but a genetically correlated multivariate trait. The research is essentially a continuation of a project Mary Oswald completed for her dissertation, however upon first submission, reviewers criticized the study for its lack of replication. So, in the Summer of 2010, she set up a second selection experiment which I took over and have been maintaining since. Boldness is an interesting behavior to…

  • Problem Solving to Victory: RLE

    Today I had a sort of “Boo-yah!” moment when I solved a problem I’ve been working on since the summer. Here’s the back story: We’ve been integrating video tracking into our behavior assays in the lab, and in order to implement this method into research, I have been working with one of the math-bio undergrads on writing R-code to import and analyze each video, pulling out variables for statistical analysis later. We’re currently tracking fish swimming behavior in two dimensions from the side with the idea that we can add a third dimension with more cameras later on. We film…

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    Evo-WIBO weekend recap

    This past weekend, I was in Port Townsend, WA for the bi-annual Evo-WIBO meeting. Evo-WIBO is a small, regional gathering of someo of the biggest names in evolutionary biology in the Pacific northwest. Its only a day and a half long and very informal. Yet, because of its size and intimacy, I got more out of this meeting than I did when I presented at the much larger SICB meeting in January. I met and hung out with more people than I would have, which made it a lot of fun. The only downside is that it was so nice…

  • Of data and formatting

    I’ve been in graduate school now for a year and a half, and I have yet to reveal just what it is I’m working on. Almost immediately coming in, I took over a project originally designed and run by Mary Oswald, the previous doctoral student who had graduated over the summer and left the lab officially at the end of my first semester. The project, in essence, is a selection experiment to analyze the genetic component of boldness, a trait often associated with the evolutionary process of domestication. Our model organism is the Zebrafish, Danio rerio. The back story is…