As the fall semester gets into swing, the lab is having a lot of fun and making progress on research. Several milestones should not go unnoticed, and there are photos to boot. In no particular order:

• A big WELCOME to the lab for PhD student Courtney Reed! Courtney joined us this summer, having recently completed a Masters at Harvard in Hopi Hoekstra's lab.
• CONGRATULATIONS to PhD candidate Bianca Brown, who passed her qualifying exams and advanced to candidacy last week!
• We had a wildly fun and successful field team representing our lab and others from Brown University in Kenya this summer, including Loren Albert (Voss postdoc fellow, Kellner lab), Patrick Freeman, Courtney Reed, Jesse Tarnas (Mustard lab), and Molly Magid (Voss undergrad fellow). 
• Ashley Bang's summer research was featured on the NOAA website for Estuary Week in September. 
• Brian Gill spent a month interfacing with Conservancy managers to address conservation challenges in Kenya, where he lost count of rhino sightings and yet still managed to submit an excellent manuscript for publication while on the road. 

Tyler was elected to the Ecological Society of America's 2018-2022 cohort of Early Career Fellows. The Society Announced the honor to recognize members who have advanced ecological knowledge and applications and show promise to make outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA.

Several members of the lab are just back from an extremely productive field trip. Highlights include a DNA barcoding workshop at the National Museums of Kenya (led by Kartzinel and Gill, and Director Musili from the East African Herbarium), many pre-dawn captures of small mammals (led by Brown and collaborators from the Goheen lab), and many trees and and megaherbivores counted (led by Gill and Lokeny). Now the team is breaking in the new lab -- copious amounts of data to report soon! Photos of the highlights are below. 

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) just released a “BioInteractive” lab featuring our research on the diets of savanna herbivores.

Educators and students in high school and college biology courses will go on an expedition to Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, where they can investigate niche partitioning as a mechanism that enables similar species to coexist. 

This extraordinarily engaging and informative BioInteractive module is inspired by — and uses real data from — our 2015 PNAS paper: “DNA metabarcoding illuminates dietary niche partitioning by African large herbivores.” The paper is becoming a “textbook” example of niche partitioning and DNA-based approaches in ecology. 

Together with Rob Pringle and our collaborators, we hope this interactive will reach thousands of students worldwide. 

​Link: https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/niche-partitioning-and-dna-metabarcoding

The full text of this exciting new paper is online today: Feeding immunity: physiological and behavioral responses to infection and resource limitation. The article appears in a special feature of Frontiers in Immunology entitled Wild immunity -- the answers are out there. Congratulations to Sarah Budischak, Andrea Graham, and coauthors!

One of the most exciting aspects of this paper is the idea of "rewilding laboratory mice" to begin understanding the ecology of this model organism in genetics and medicine. What happens when lab mice are infected with an intestinal parasite, put outside, and tasked with surviving in a world with limited resources? 

Add on top of that all of the exciting technology brought together to probe this creative experiment for mechanism -- PIT tags, DNA metabarcoding, NMR spectroscopy -- and you've got the makings of a classic. In this experiment, custom-built feeding devices capable of tracking foraging behavior, paired with DNA metabarcoding, revealed compensatory feeding behaviors by mice that otherwise might have masked the effects of infection.

Especially relevant to research in our lab, a hormone called leptin that serves as an indicator of hunger and body fat was correlated with consumption of different species of wild plants. Animals with higher leptin concentrations tended to eat more protein-rich clovers and other legumes than did animals with lower leptin, potentially pointing to different foraging behaviors and differential selectivity for wild foods as mechanisms for dealing with infection while reestablishing a dietary niche after generations in the laboratory. Although the effect sizes for the DNA metabarcoding data were small, these tantalizing trends highlight the importance of these measurements and the value of the technique. A valuable contribution.

As we kick off the new academic year, we extend the warmest welcome to Dr. Brian Gill, inaugural IBES postdoc in the lab. Brian's doctoral research fused a cutting-edge molecular tool kit with some extremely rugged field research to test important ideas in ecology and evolution. For example, Brian used DNA barcoding to identify a huge diversity of mayflies from tropical and temperate streams, revealing that their elevational ranges are narrower in the tropics, where species may be more sensitive to the effects of climate change -- a result that may not have been so clearcut in the absence of molecular data, due to the prevalence of cryptic species. We all look forward to benefiting from Brian's leadership and skills as we study how species are respond to environmental changes in New England, in East Africa, and around the world.