The lab recently attended the 45th annual Benthic Ecology Meeting located in Portland, Maine. This meeting occurs yearly allowing scientists to exchange information on benthic ecosystems and to encourage the next generation of benthic biologists.

Stacy presented an oral presentation on her newly published paper Unconscious uncoupling: invasion of novel habitats disrupts haploid-diploid life cycles.

 Paige and Sarah presented their research at the poster session. 
Paige's poster was titled Are introduced populations of the seaweed ​Gracilaria​​ vermiculophylla ​more resistant to herbivores  than native  populations?  A test of post ­invasion adaptation.

Sarah presented  The  Role  of  Heat  Tolerance  in  the  Invasive  Success  of the Red  Seaweed ​Gracilaria  vermiculophylla 

Glauco is hard at work tweaking the methodology for his feeding assays as mentioned in our last post! He is currently measuring out samples that will be used to study the diet of amphipods. 

The whole Sotka Lab is on spring break this week. All except for Glauco! Glauco has been busy redesigning his experiment methodology. Sometimes scientists will start an experiment, and it does not always turn out accordingly. So what do they do? They don't give up, they try again! Glauco set up a feeding assay for herbivores using an artificial food source. The herbivores did not eat the fake food, so he will be redesigning the same experiment using the real deal... seaweed!