Anna Merritt has received funding from the OU Honors College Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program for her honors project, "Investigating influence of sensory cues on neural activation in Trinidadian guppies". We are looking forward to seeing what Anna finds in those guppy brains!
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Congratulations to Ph.D. student Laura G., who published a review in the special issue "Behavioral Ecology of Venom" in the journal Toxins! In this review, Laura outlines what we know (and primarily how much we do not know) about the development of venom over an individual's lifetime in spiders and the role (if any) the evolution of venom has played in the evolution of sociality. Keep an eye out for Laura's projects testing some of these cool hypotheses! Paper can be accessed here. Congratulations are in order! Ph.D. student Laura Gatch was awarded an Animal Behavior Society student research grant to study links between venom and social behavior in Latrodectus spiders.
First Year Research Experience (FYRE) students Amiya Dehadrai and Jaci Currie presented their posters at the virtual FYRE symposium. Amiya presented results showing that guppies raised in enriched environments have larger brains than those raised in deprived environments, and Jaci found a maternal effect on offspring longevity in Latrodectus. Jaci was also awarded best poster in her section. Congrats to both! The lab is in full swing this spring, with lots of updates and some new faces! Here are just a few of the things we have been up to:
Laura Gatch (Ph.D. Student): Spider husbandry is in full swing! All protocols are now in effect, and we continue to learn more about their limitations as I conduct experiments, some with greater success than others. I have recently resubmitted revisions for a review paper, which I presented at SICB this January. Stay tuned! Faith Leri (Ph.D. Student): Since arriving in July 2020, I have placed my focus on establishing the new fish room, starting experiments, and practicing molecular work in the lab. After collecting from the ARF in the fall, our Trinidadian guppy lab population has grown exponentially. This has provided me with enough fish to begin two concurrent experiments examining how cues received in the parental generation influence offspring behavior. In addition, I have been working on molecular techniques in the lab, such as using the cryostat and resulting brain slices to perform IHC. My hope for the remainder of the year is to build on this foundation by conducting more experiments and establishing additional molecular protocols in the lab! Jordon Henderson (Undergraduate Researcher): My name is Jordon, and I am a senior undergraduate majoring in biology. For the past year I have been exploring research fields that include behavioral/phenotypic plasticity, conservation, and animal communication. I am currently volunteering as a tech in the Stein lab doing husbandry tasks for Latrodectus (Black Widows) and will soon be starting my own projects. I also work part-time for the Sam Noble Museum collecting specimens as an Infectious Disease Field Assistant. Anika Jallipalli (Undergraduate Researcher): Hi! I am an undergraduate freshman biology major interested in entering the field of family medicine. I am originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma and have been loving my time here at the University of Oklahoma. I will be working in fish husbandry in the lab and am super excited to be a part of it. I look forward to running my own behavioral studies! A lot has happened since January! Focusing on the good stuff: - The fish room was finally built! As of a couple of weeks ago, our first guppies are thriving and we will be running our first fish experiments this fall! - Laura G. has been continuing to collect spiders for her social behavior experiments, also coming up this fall! - Faith Leri has joined the lab! Faith is interested in behavioral plasticity, parental effects, and molecular mechanisms informing behavioral development. She has worked with fish in the past and will be kicking off our studies of parental effects in different species of Poeciliids! Welcome, Faith! SICB 2020 in Austin was a great time full of excellent science, great conversations, and seeing old friends. Laura S. presented on the first data coming out of last spring's Big Experiment. It turns out that sex is a better predictor of how offspring respond to personal and parental cues than population history! Stay tuned for more exciting results.
PhD student Laura Gatch has hit the ground running with a project aimed at understanding how early experience influences the development of social behavior and mechanisms for mitigating social risk in Latrodectus, the newest lab study system. With lots of collection and new babies hatching every day, we are excited to be generating our first data as a lab. Watch this space!
We are happy to announce that Dain and Quinn are now officially co-lab managers of the Stein Lab at OU! Following Laura S from Colorado, Dain and Quinn are quickly learning the ropes of getting a new lab up and running while figuring out spider husbandry and collection. They will also be continuing lines of independent research in fishes that they began as undergraduates at CSU. We are very happy to have them!
After a fun-filled week at the Animal Behavior Society 2019 meeting where Quinn gave her first poster at a conference and Laura gave a fast-paced overview of the first data coming out of the Big Experiment, we are on our way to Norman to formally establish the Stein Lab! Keep an eye out for updates as we get the lab up and running!
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