SCHMITZ LAB AT YALE
  • Home
  • People
    • Os Schmitz
    • Annise Dobson
    • Elizabeth Forbes
    • Matteo Rizzuto
    • Mary Burak
    • Kristy Ferraro
    • Kaggie Orrick
    • Nathalie Sommer
    • Dylan Feldmeier
    • Vivian Hawkinson
    • Janey Lienau
    • Urmila Mallick
    • Mizna Almaazmi
    • Gino Rivera Bulnes
    • Amanda Wik
    • Daviana Berkowitz-Skla
    • Lab Alumni
  • Research
    • Animals in Carbon and Nutrient Cycling
    • Human-Wildlife Interactions
    • Landscape Spatial Dynamics
    • Species Interactions in Food Webs
    • Invasive Species
  • Blog
  • Pubs
  • Media
  • Join

Summer for the Schmitzers

5/15/2013

5 Comments

 
--Jennie Miller, PhD Candidate

Classes have ended and we’re ramping up for summer fieldwork here in the Schmitz Lab. Five of the Schmitzers will be working in the field, carrying out innovative projects with lizards, spiders, grasshoppers and pollinators in Greece, Connecticut and Vermont.

Colin departed three weeks ago for the islands of Greece, where he’s collecting preliminary data on lizard morphology in the presence of predators and rock wall refugia. Colin will be catching lizards and measuring every diagnostic metric he can think of to motivate his upcoming dissertation experiments. He left for Greece with some pretty cool field equipment, including snake tongs and a lizard bite balance. Hope the lizards are biting, Colin!

Karin will be starting the sandbox experiment of her dissertation, which will run for the next few years. In June, she’ll transplant Solidago altissima plants from our greenhouse into cages in the fields of nearby Wallingford, CT. She’ll catch grasshoppers and stock the cages to examine their effects on the plants.

Bryan will be studying how local adaptation in grasshoppers affects ecosystem response to climate warming. He’ll be comparing how grasshoppers from Connecticut (which likely adapted to handle warm temperatures) and grasshoppers from Vermont (expected to handle cooler temperatures) affect plant communities. Bryan plans to carry out a transplant experiment in which he’ll move CT grasshoppers to VT and likewise VT grasshoppers to CT and then examine differences in how the grasshoppers consume plants in field cages subjected to warmed conditions (simulating climate change). Bryan expects that the cool-adapted VT population of grasshoppers will be more phenotypically plastic in its response to warming.

Rob has been prepping for fieldwork this summer by working in the lab, exposing Solidago plants to nitrogen and examining how the addition of nutrients to the soil impacts the rate of nitrogen cycling. He’ll be carrying out complimentary field experiments at the Yale Myers Forest, in which he’ll expose caged, old-field plots to different aboveground and belowground community compositions by altering the presence of herbivore grasshoppers, carnivorous spiders and microbial grazing springtails.

Our undergrad Kassie will spend her first summer with the Schmitz Lab up at the Yale Myers Forest. She’ll be studying native pollinator community and plant-insect interaction webs across an anthropogenic impact gradient. Kassie is a big fan of native bees, which she believes are an important component of ecosystem health and are increasingly important as managed bee populations are in decline (especially the European honey bee Apis mellifera). This summer Kassie will spend her days watching bees, searching for correlative ecological, life history and landscape clues to the most important factors that support or disrupt pollinator communities. Good luck Kassie!

Meanwhile, back in Greeley lab, Anne, Kevin and I will make ground-shaking progress in our spatial analyses of animal movement, distribution and predation patterns while sunbathing in the botanical garden to keep up with our labmates’ tans. Here’s to a fantastic summer!
Picture
5 Comments
titanoboa link
8/9/2016 03:45:53 pm

Great post

Reply
black wildebeest link
10/7/2016 01:05:33 am

This article is really fantastic and thanks for sharing the valuable post.

Reply
Kwik Print A0 A1 A2 link
12/27/2022 02:42:03 am

Enjoyed reading the article above, really explains everything in detail, the article is very interesting and effective. Thank you and good luck… This site is very helpful for me. I love that site and it is also an informative site

Reply
atika link
3/5/2023 11:54:07 pm

It's great to hear about the diverse range of research projects being carried out, from studying lizard morphology and behavior in the presence of predators to examining how grasshoppers and pollinators affect plant communities. Thank you for sharing

Reply
Yenibosna Tesisatçı link
3/14/2023 05:19:34 pm

Working areas; installation, construction, replacement and plumbing services.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    November 2019
    April 2018
    August 2017
    July 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    February 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013

    Categories

    All
    Animal Movement
    Energy
    Field Stories
    Human Wildlife Conflict
    Human-wildlife Conflict
    Large Carnivores
    Plant Herbivore
    Plant-herbivore


    Tweets by @SchmitzLab

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • People
    • Os Schmitz
    • Annise Dobson
    • Elizabeth Forbes
    • Matteo Rizzuto
    • Mary Burak
    • Kristy Ferraro
    • Kaggie Orrick
    • Nathalie Sommer
    • Dylan Feldmeier
    • Vivian Hawkinson
    • Janey Lienau
    • Urmila Mallick
    • Mizna Almaazmi
    • Gino Rivera Bulnes
    • Amanda Wik
    • Daviana Berkowitz-Skla
    • Lab Alumni
  • Research
    • Animals in Carbon and Nutrient Cycling
    • Human-Wildlife Interactions
    • Landscape Spatial Dynamics
    • Species Interactions in Food Webs
    • Invasive Species
  • Blog
  • Pubs
  • Media
  • Join