Posts in Graduate students
Busy spring cricket hatch!

We spent the spring hatching diapause crickets from 6 allopatric populations and F1 hybrids for our QTL mapping project. We could haven’t have done this without help from Alyson and an amazing team of undergraduates (thank you Ella, Hannah, Jayne, Ariella, Aiden, Whitney, Alexandra, Halle and Isabella!). Isaac has collected a ton of data on male calling song and completed an experiment to test hybrid immune function. I completed test crosses of hybrid male’s ability to fertilize females of each species. Soon we can have a break from the crickets before our fall field season.

 
 
Fall field season is underway

TJ is leading a massive field effort between the Larson and Firneno Labs! Below are a few photos from their various trips across the field cricket hybrid zone.

Cricket Course at Archbold Field Station

Gabrielle, Scott and Lauren went to Cricket Course, a five-day workshop at the Archbold Biological Station in Florida that  provided hands-on training in identification, ecology, behavior, and bioacoustics of crickets. The Larson and Tinghitella Lab team learned taxonomy and bioacoustics, and received training in ensiferan collection, rearing, recording, song analysis, species identification, and pinning.

 
 
Fall Lab Retreat

The Larson Lab, Taylor Lab (University of Colorado Boulder), Runemark Lab (Lund University), and Velotta Lab (University of Denver) had a fall research retreat at CU’s Mountain Research Station. Everyone presented their research, cooked lots of great food and carved pumpkins.

 
 
New lab preprints!

Exciting to see these new preprints online:

Kelsie’s first chapter of her dissertation - super proud of this one! https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.08.451646

An amazingly fun project with the awesome Mollie Manier: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.15.468624v1

A new paper on disrupted X chromosome expression in sterile mouse hybrids: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.12.468424v1

And two impressive collaborations led by the Good Lab at the University of Montana from Emily Kopania: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.04.455131v2 and from Emily Moore: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.15.468705v2

Kelsie representing the Lab

Kelsie gave two awesome talks in the last few weeks. The first was about her work on hybridization in Colorado cottontails at the American Society of Mammalogists and the second was about patterns of gene expression in complex tissues at the Evolution meeting.