Dunlap Cognitive Ecology Lab

Introducing our work with Green House Venture

Aimee and George have been busy with a new collaboration with Green House Venture, a nonprofit in St. Louis focused on education, STEM, and agriculture.

Or here from STL|NPR: UMSL study will investigate pollinator activity at a roadside garden

Or watch this video, where we were featured on Living St. Louis on Nine PBS and where Aimee does an impression of a bumblebee grooming pollen off of itself while flying:

How Do Bees Behave Near Highways? | Living St. Louis

outreach, research

It is Cicada Time!

A 13 year periodical cicada emergence is underway in St. Louis! UMSL Biology Assistant Professor Sara Miller and History Professor Andrew Hurley have joined forces with Aimee Dunlap to study how this cicada emergence is influenced by current and historic patterns of land use in St. Louis.

Not everyone is as excited by the cicada emergence as we are, but we have been happy to talk to the press in our efforts to recruit members of the community to help us collect data.

STL|PR joined Sara and Aimee in the field at Lafayette Square Park and we joined them in the studio to talk about cicadas and the why insects are so cool. And Aimee was interviewed by the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

We are looking forward to the analysis phase of this project!

outreach, research

New WIRED article on urban bees and our orchard project

Fun to read this article today on urban pollination and the need to support bees. There are some great quotes from collaborators Gerardo Camilo, Ed Spevak, and Dean Gunderson from SeedSTL (as well as from lab PI Aimee Dunlap).

Grad student George Todd is working on this project along with Jordan Hathaway from the Muchhala Lab and a great group of undergrads.

https://www.wired.com/story/cities-need-more-native-bees-lots-and-lots-of-adorable-bees/

presentations, students

Jeremy’s ABS talk on the Zombie Games Lab

This week is the virtual half of the Animal Behavior Society meeting. Grad student Jeremy Howard is presenting a video talk entitled “Teaching Foraging and Vigilance in Animal Behavior Lab through “Zombie Games.” This is a lab that we’ve been teaching for a number of years, and it is lots of fun for the students and they tend to learn the material very well. Most of the lab joined in to help Jeremy demonstrate how it works.

Let us know if you have any questions about the lab and ways that we’ve modified it to adjust to different circumstances and student needs. Hope you enjoy the talk!

Uncategorized

Congratulations to Rachel on her PhD defense!!

It was a week full of awesome lab successes, and capped by Rachel Brant’s excellent dissertation talk and defense last Friday. For her talk, Rachel focused in on two chapters that formed the bulk of her fieldwork with sweat bees: an analysis of pollen foraging behaviors across urban, suburban, and exurban sites, along with lots of environmental variables and a brain RNA-seq study from bees at these same sites. Many thanks also to her committee, Bob Marquis, Nathan Muchhala, and Mike Arduser.

We will be all be seeing papers from this work later this year- her chapter 1 review manuscript is accepted, chapter 2 on foraging behavior is under review, and the manuscript from chapter 3 is pending some additional data from this summer. Chapter 4 is under revision after co-author comments.

Rachel managed an extremely productive four years in the lab and we are all thrilled for her next challenge as a post doc at the Missouri Botanic Garden.