News

Via Zoom, Alex easily passed her MS thesis defense today. She tackled several of the remaining taxonomic and life cycle problems in our horn snail trematode guild, conducting an impressive amount of high quality, well-rounded species and life cycle descriptions. She now leaves us to start on her PhD with Skylar Hopkins at North Carolina State. Congrats Alex!

At the annual (virtual) meeting for the American Society of Parasitologists, Anaí impressed the judges with her presentation entitled: “Mapping parasitism onto host geographic ranges: Do host populations differ in their levels or types of parasitism between range edges and range centers?” Congrats!

Congrats to Dan! He won both the Southern California Society of Parasitology and the broader Southern California Academy of Sciences best student paper awards for at the Spring virtual meeting. He gave a talk, Detecting the hidden dynamics of social organization in colonies using projection matrix models, where he presented a technique that can really help us better understand how trematode colonies with soldiers work (and a lot of other things too).

Some of the lab attended the 2021 Annual Meetings (via Zoom) of the Southern California Academy of Sciences and the Southern California Society of Parasitology. Dan gave a talk presenting a new method to help crack open the dynamics and structure of colonial organisms (including trematodes with soldiers). Anai gave a talk presenting some of her thesis results concerning parasitism throughout entire species ranges. And, Alex gave a talk presenting her “old” work on the ecological parasitology of our common, sandy beach dwelling ‘bean clam’. The SCSP had a nice ‘catch up’ meeting afterwards. It was a good day.

Congratulations to Anai! She was awarded the Western Society of Naturalists Rafe Sagarin Award for Observational Ecology. These funds will permit her to enhance her dissertation work dealing with the biogeography of parasitism. See the WSN 2021 Spring Newsletter for more info.