University of Michigan
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

EEB Ph.D. student John Guittar, and incoming Ph.D. students Jordan Bemmels and Katherine Crocker are recipients of National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. They receive $30,000 a year for three years and an additional $10,500 annually for healthcare and tuition.

Bemmels hopes to study the genomic basis of local adaptation in drought tolerance in populations of a tropical tree species, along a precipitation gradient in Panama.  This work will provide insight into the evolutionary biology of drought adaptation, as well as have implications for predicting how populations may respond to changing climates. Bemmels has elected to put his funding on reserve status during 2011-2012.

Katherine Crocker will be doing behavioral ecology research with Professor Elizabeth Tibbetts, and she anticipates working with chemical communication in Hymenoptera, one of the largest orders of insects comprising wasps, bees, ants and sawflies.

Guittar will investigate the origins and evolution of Pouteria, a taxonomically confusing genus of trees with a high relative abundance in many tropical forests. Read more about Guittar’s research in the following news item. Pictured (left to right): Jordan Bemmels, Katherine Crocker, John Guittar.

Cindy Bick, Frontiers master’s student and John Guittar, Ph.D. student, are winners of U-M’s International Institute Individual Fellowships. They will each receive $4,000 to help support their research abroad.

Cindy Bick will conduct research this summer at the Zoological Society of London. Bick will be gathering demographic data from their captive Tahitian tree snail populations to investigate why some species differentially survived a recent mass extinction event.

Guittar will investigate the origins and evolution of Pouteria, a taxonomically confusing genus of trees with a high relative abundance in many tropical forests.  “Specifically, I am interested in exploring the roles of hybridization and reproductive isolation on tropical tree diversification,” said Guittar. “The International Institute Fellowship will support one summer of travel and help me to build connections with botanists and local students at Yasuni field station in eastern Ecuador.” 

Professor Mark Hunter and colleagues at Emory University published what will be the cover story in the May 2011 issue of Ecology Letters. Their paper shows how one animal species in a community can affect how a different animal species catches a disease.

Hunter says that this paper is the second part of a story about how monarch butterflies get disease. In their October 2010 Ecology Letters paper, they showed that female monarchs choose plants with a chemistry that reduces disease transmission.

For the current paper, they studied a food web consisting of two species of milkweed, two milkweed herbivores (monarch butterfly and oleander aphid) and a monarch butterfly specific parasite. 

“It turns out that animals like aphids can change the chemistry of milkweeds so that monarch butterflies become more susceptible to disease,” Hunter said. “We normally think of disease transmission as being a matter only for the disease and the host organism. It turns out that other species matter too.” Image: Jaap de Roode

EEB graduate student Leiling Tao has been awarded the Barbour Scholarship for 2010-11 by the Rackham Graduate School.

Tao joins a long line of outstanding women who, over the past 96 years, have become leaders in science, education, public service, medicine and other fields in their home countries all over the world. She will receive $17,200, tuition and health and dental insurance for the academic year.

In 1914, the bequest of Levi L. Barbour established a scholarship program at U-M for women of the highest academic and professional caliber from the area formerly known as the Orient (encompassing the region extending from Turkey in the west to Japan and the Philippines in the east) to study modern science, medicine, mathematics and other academic disciplines and professions critical to the development of their native lands. Tao is originally from Guangzhou, China. She graduated from Sun Yat-sen University with a bachelor's degree in ecology in 2008. Tao currently studies how resource imbalance affects species interactions under global environmental change. For her future career she plans to apply her knowledge in theoretical and applied research to natural and degraded ecosystems in China.

Professor George Estabrook’s  book "A Computational Approach to Statistical Argument in Ecology and Evolution," published by Cambridge University Press, will be available in September 2011.

“Scientists need statistics. Increasingly this is accomplished using computational approaches. Freeing readers from the constraints, mysterious formulas and sophisticated mathematics of classical statistics, this book is ideal for researchers who want to take control of their own statistical arguments. It demonstrates how to use spreadsheet macros to calculate the probability distribution predicted for any statistic by any hypothesis. This enables readers to use anything that can be calculated (or observed) from their data as a test statistic and hypothesize any probabilistic mechanism that can generate data sets similar in structure to the one observed.

“A wide range of natural examples drawn from ecology, evolution, anthropology, palaeontology and related fields give valuable insights into the application of the described techniques, while complete example macros and useful procedures demonstrate the methods in action and provide starting points for readers to use or modify in their own research.” (from CUP’s website) Preorder the book.

More than 120 Detroit Public School sixth-graders presented the results of small-group science projects March 22 at the Michigan League Ballroom to local scientists that included a large EEB contingent. The students answered questions about what they have learned about ecosystems, biodiversity and ecology, and had an opportunity to ask the scientists questions.
“I was really happy with the turnout from EEB and other university units,” said George Hammond, research program officer the Museum of Zoology and program officer for BioKIDS. “Along with SNRE and PitE, we had a few folks from environmental health, School of Ed, engineering, even dentistry. The kids seemed to have great time.”

One of the teachers mentioned to Hammond that her kids were anxious beforehand, afraid that they were going to be sternly questioned by the scientists. They were really happy when everyone was so positive, and this was great for their confidence, Hammond said.

“The BioKIDS Convention demonstrates once again that not only are Detroit Public School elementary age students capable of sophisticated thinking about current and important science topics, but that they thrive with such challenges,” said Nancy Songer, professor of education and project director of BioKIDS and Deep Think.

“Lately it seems as if a lot of talk associated with education and schools focuses on failing schools or cheating on tests. The BioKIDS Convention also proves that successful partnerships between public schools and universities not only exist, but they can shift the talk to topics that are more important, such as kids and learning.”

Appreciation goes out to the following who represented EEB at the convention: David Allen, Susan Cheng, Jasmine Crumsey, Brian Dorsey, Evan Economo, Kenneth Elgersma, Huijie Gan, Deborah Goldberg, Antonio Golubski, John Guittar, Aaron Iverson, Doug Jackson, Jo Kurdziel, Hayley Lanier, Ines Ibanez, John Marino, Gail McCormick (undergraduate), Leslie McGinnis, Marshall McMunn (undergraduate), Susanna Messinger, Theresa Ong, Semoya Phillips, Lucy Tran, Liz Wason, William Webb.