#sicb2023 — Public Fediverse posts

#2023 has been a blast wrt conferences already! I was thrilled to present my #MSCA #postdoc work both at #SICB2023 at Austin, USA & at #ISEB2023 at Ahmedabad, India! Very happy & thankful for these opportunities 🤍 It’s time to buckle up & get work done 🐒

I'm super excited to say that I am the new SICB Division of Phylogenetics & Comparative Biology Student/Postdoc Rep!

I'll be working with the division & @SICB to put on ECR-focused programming & be a resource for ECRs.

My job in this role is to support YOU: feel free to reach out w/ what the division & I can do for you!

#SICB #SICB2023 @SICBJOURNALS

If you missed talks at #SICB2023 just head over to @eringiglio. She live tweets every talk she goes to and it’s honestly The Best Thing

Had so much fun at #SICB2023 with this wonderful group of people! I’m very proud of the wonderful presentations everyone gave about our lab’s research 🥰 @SICB

Ondi Crino at #SICB2023:what are the mechanisms by which development perturbations wind up impacting adult phenotype? Well, things like growth, body condition, cognitive performance, etc are all expensive, so: consider the humble powerhouse of the cell?

Lots of pathways through which development perturbations might affect variation in mitochondria fxn. These can be short term (mitochondria prodxn, regulation of gene factors, or hormonal signaling) or even longer term epigenetic modifications.

#SICB2023: Shayne Halter finds that torpor allows hummingbirds to save energy and reduce body mass loss, ESPECIALLY for smaller birds. Smaller birds are more likely to go into torpor. Torpor frequency vanished as birds got larger within a species.

Seminatural deer mice were born in the lab and acclimated in the enclosures for 6mo before measurements were taken.

"We wanted to capture wild mice and introduce them into the semi natural enclosures, but we couldn't get IACUC approval for that because they are very, very dirty."

There were so many memorable quotes at #SICB2023 this year...

#SICB2023: Kaylene Yamada discusses strengths and weaknesses of studying behavior in lab and field. Useful examples of phenotypes that are not visible in the lab, but immediately become apparent in natural or seminatural environments! Focus: Peromyscus. Love this kind of work!

Holy crap she took SO MANY msrs of condition, metabolism and energy balance from mice in three populations in her enclosures. What a data set!

#SICB2023: from @MollySimonis (Twitter), big brown bats are an interesting case study for torpidity research because they are prone to long term (>10 yrs!) infections with invasive pathogenic fungus Pd. Pre-Pd msrs with continuous ambient temperatures already in the lit.

After Pd infection, metabolic savings with torpidity vary considerably with ambient temperatures. If minimal temperature the bats can tolerate has shifted to be warmer, that puts them right in the middle of Pd sweet spot! 😬😬😬

#SICB2023 talk from @_stans96 (Twitter): because birds usually manage synchronous hatching by not brooding until full clutch is laid, climate change can throw wrenches into the mix. Higher ambient temperatures can start incubating first laid eggs well ahead of schedule!

Well, if you have a bunch of siblings that are suddenly developing at different rates, that introduces a new chance based axis of variation. What happens if we use heat packs to do that on purpose?

OKAY! Now that my friends are asleep and we are , it's time to start crossposting my #SICB2023 blogs/tweets/whatever they are between platforms.

....Idly, does anyone know if there's a decent mastodon-to-twitter crossposter or something? because I'd really like to make this my main home, but for specifically conference uses it's still unfortunately easier to reach people over at the birdsite.

Leaving Austin today, after yet another great #SICB2023 meeting! I love how wildly diverse this meeting is, in case you need a break from your research area, you may end up at a talk about hemipenes in snakes, elephant trunks being modeled via knitting, or applying #queer #feminist language and ideas to biological research. A crocheted vampire squid was sold for student travel funds. Had such a blast with everyone and it was so wonderful to be back in person.

‘The structure of a classroom gets you different function.’ K.Tanner #SICB2023

Last of the #SICB2023 invited talks: @jennhoutz (Twitter)! For seasonal breeders, breeding timing is CRUCIAL for determining organismal fitness. Mistiming breeding can be fatal--but climate change is changing all the cues. How are birds responding?

Well, tree swallows at least are breeding earlier. Earlier birds have greater lifetime breeding success, BUT early lay dates put birds at risk of unpredictable cold snaps. Snow found INSIDE the nest box in late spring!

Jennifer Uehling ( @juehlz on Twitter) at #SICB2023: Do glucocorticoids predict movement? Movements are really important to the ways in which animals exert control over an often unpredictable environment.

Awww yeah it's a grocery store metaphor! Some people are very organized; some people tend to circle around through a grocery store when foraging; there's also people like me who get overwhelmed and move along a roughly similar pattern visit to visit but at wildly different speeds....

Next up at #SICB2023 , @wolf_SarahE (Twitter) is interested on the effects of stress on female ovulation and provisioning. Females often compete quite strenuously and this has all kinds of impact on ovulation and egg providing. How do telomere dynamics play into this?

That is, how does social competition interact with age related gene expression in tree swallow ovaries? Female aggression is very important in this spp; unattached female "floaters" often evict nesting females from nest sites!

Next at #SICB2023 , @sewestrick (from Eva Fischer's lab) looks at GCs in dart frogs. Generally we assume that dominant GC in amphibians is corticosterone, not cortisol... but as in all biology, exceptions abound! Hellbenders for ex actually have much more stress responsive cortisol levels than corticosterone levels.

Dart frogs have some interestingly stressful behaviors. Cortisol only is elevated during tadpole transport (dad frogs carry tadpoles from bromeliad to bromeliad during development).

Anyway, Morgan Benowitz-Fredricks kicks off this #SICB2023 by asking what the relationship between cort and behavior is: can behaviors elevate cort, and can cort changes alter behavior? We are carefully avoiding the word "stress" for clarity reasons here.

I actually remember this work from #SICB2020--the kittiwakes are a really neat system and the video footage design and especially the ability to handle and interact with the chicks by using a hidden door made of one way glass is so elegant.

I feel like starting the #SICB2023 Stress Impacts series by suddenly realizing that my earbuds charging case had fallen out of my pockets is an experience ENTIRELY too on the nose.

And @EllenCoombs presenting her super cool work with toothed whales & their mandibular shape! #SICB2023

#SICB2023, Marcelle Gray: if a bear wandered into YOUR house, what would you do? Yell? Hide? Run for it? (Well, I'm going to be thinking about that all day now...)

Birds also have to grapple with this problem, even if their predators are a little smaller. Here focusing on house sparrows, Eastern bluebirds, swallows in a variety of neighborhoods.

How does predation frequency tie into this?

Oh god I was wrong they totally do have to deal with bears

Bumblebees are able to eat all kinds of stuff (they’re “generalist foragers”) and are often faced with lots of options for food.

@felicity_muth is working to understand how they choose which spots to visit.

She’s sharing her work at #SICB2023

#SICB2023 : "There's tons of advice about parenting. Sometimes it seems that the only consistent thread for humans is that you're definitely doing it wrong." Sarah Foltz bringing the tradeoffs that parents struggle with to the forefront.

In altricial songbirds, questions: how does offspring value influence parental nest defense? Assumption that nest defense investment should correspond to increased fledge success... At least where ND necessary, possible, and effective.

Thanks #SICB2023 for an excellent first national meeting for my undergrad research team. Also thankful to see old friends and colleagues!

Goddamn I meant to go to bed early so I could be up to see the #SICB2023 talks tomorrow but the politics are just too fuckin entertaining 🍿