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events, students

Congrats to Dr. Andreia Figueiredo Dexheimer!

We are so thrilled to congratulate Andreia on her successful dissertation defense today! Andreia gave a fabulous talk in person and on Zoom. Her dissertation, “Cognitive Ecology of Color Vision in Orchid Bees,” involved a mix of field work in Florida, some conceptual work, and some lab work, both here at UMSL and with the Morehouse Lab at the University of Cincinnati. Andreia also worked with the Saint Louis Zoo for part of her research.

Congratulations Andreia! A tremendous amount of work and thought, as well as skill, was needed to navigate completing a dissertation in the middle of a pandemic. Excellent work!

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Living STL episode on Dr. Charles Henry Turner

Lab alumnus Kamau MuseMorris and Aimee were both recently interviewed about bee cognition for a local PBS show dedicated to Dr. Charles Henry Turner. Dr. Turner taught high school at Sumner in St. Louis for 14 years and published a series of landmark papers on insect behavior and cognition, including about bees. Despite being well-known in his time, most people in St. Louis have never heard of him or his contributions.

A series of recent papers have further highlighted his work. Dr. Danielle Lee, colleague and professor at SIUE, wrote a paper, which highlighted Dr. Turner’s work along with his activism. Her paper deals with diversity and inclusion activism across the history of animal behavior research in the US, and is an excellent read for animal behaviorists.

You can watch this segment of Living STL here:

research, students

Catching Royalty

We managed to celebrate the spring a bit by catching a few queen bumble bees for Jeremy’s summer project. I never imagined we’d be allowed in to the Missouri Botanic Gardens with insect nets, so it was wonderful to be granted permission to collect a couple of queens and great fun to be able to do so on a day when the gardens were closed to the public. We then traveled to the Litzinger Road Ecology Center where James Faupel and an intern joined us to wrap up our captures.

Few things are more fun than hearing a buzz, spotting a queen, and running at her with a net. It is like being in a living Far Side cartoon. Beautiful morning and great to be doing science together after a long COVID winter.

  • We saw quite a few bees around the crabapples.
  • One of the queens, who was quickly moved into a nestbox in the lab.
  • Virginia bluebells are usually a guarantee for spring queens, but not on this day.
  • Jeremy and his first bee!
  • Rachel caught the first bee of the day!

presentations, students

Color Preference in Orchid Bees

Andreia and Aimee attended the first all virtual Animal Behavior Society meeting last week. It was really great to have a chance to see all the talks asynchronously, so neither of us missed anything we wanted to watch. The challenging part of the talks for everyone was fitting a presentation into only six minutes!

Andreia summed things up well:

And here is Andreia’s talk if you’d like to hear a little bit about her dissertation work on orchid bees.

students

Congrats to Dr. Matt Austin

Former grad student Matthew Austin successfully defended his dissertation, giving a wonderful talk describing some of his research during his five years at UMSL. He’s finishing up the final changes to his dissertation, and is starting his postdoctoral fellowship with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University, where he will also be doing research at the Missouri Botanic Gardens.

We managed a drive-by celebration at his house later in the day. Hopefully we can have a belated in person celebration later this year.

Jose Antonio from the Parker Lab got a great screen shot at the end of the talk.