Even in Kyoto

What's the difference between am entomologist and an etymologist?

I don't know, and it bugs me in a way I can't put into words.

So, Sunday was the Eastern Branch Meeting of the Entomological Society of America, which took place in a town north of here. It was close enough to campus that my research students were excited about the idea of being able to go and present their research, so they did! Here's the busy poster hall in the midst of the poster presentations:



The meeting organizers also organized a Bug Expo event to accompany the conference, and I said we could put together an ant activity table for the Bug Expo, too. That meant that I got up extra early Sunday morning to drive to campus and assemble supplies for our table. We did bring along some hissing cockroaches, too, just for solidarity.

Here's a picture of the convention center rooms where our Expo took place:



By sheer coincidence, there was another, larger Expo taking place on the main floor of the conference center, too, showcasing sports and other active lifestyle things to do in Upstate New York. Ultimately, I think the fact there were two expos happening meant that both expos got more traffic. We were definitely busy for the entire day, to the extent that I never made it to any of the conference talks at all.

Our most popular item was our offering of ant stamp temporary tattoos. I had a lot of fun amending this person's spider tattoo (although the ant wound up being fainter than intended):



The item with the black cloth over it was to add intrigue around our display of The Largest Ant in the World?? We had fun pulling out the ant to show it to people (Dinomyrmex gigas). I was also pleased with how the "What's in an Ant Colony?" display poster and stand turned out. We'll be able to reuse that for other outreach events in the future.



There were lots of other great insect- and arthropod-themed things on display, like this insect origami station where people could fold their own cicadas and butterflies:



The people with these Bessie Bugs (Bess beetles, family Passalidae) had a series of creative interactive activities to foster appreciation for the beetles (and beyond):



I appreciated the display on how to handle the beetles, "Hold it like you are picking up a piece of candy."



Our table neighbors come from a biodiversity research farm/site a bit to the south of Albany:



It was great to see them, because I'm hoping to go and pay them a visit once the weather warms up a bit. As part of their suite of biodiversity surveys, they have been surveying ant diversity across a range of sites, from a site they consider "ancient forest" (no signs of any human occupation, ever), to sites planted with a range of different types of vegetation, including pollinator-friendly mixes or more conventional agricultural plantings.

There were also people who run a business for creating insect-friendly garden landscapes, who had a great display highlighting all of the kinds of spaces that different kinds of insects like to use:



A grad student group also participated, selling a bunch of different insect-themed wares to raise funds for student support. The gray crocheted mosquitoes were hilarious. They also had beetle elytra earrings for sale, so I finally bought some. So shiny.



As to be expected, some of the outreach was in the name of biocontrol. Apparently someone got funds some time ago to have insect/arthropod mascot costumes made for an Asian longhorn beetle and for an anatomically accurate tick:





Somewhat inexplicably, there were a bunch of reptiles, snakes, and raptors at the Bug Expo, too.



We only made it over to see the raptors shortly before the Expo wrapped up. The raptor handlers said that they were participating because certain raptors (and the other reptiles, I suppose) eat insects. I suppose so.



In addition to the ant tattoos, we also folded and handed out a ton of ant zines, maybe around 85 of the 100 I photocopied. All told, a good and productive day, but also exhausting.

Yesterday at the very end of a quite full day, as I was finishing up a rewrite of the first Animal Physiology exam, a colleague knocked on my door to ask for help with a surprise shipment of sea creatures. I'd been maintaining our large flow-through saltwater tank with the idea that even if I didn't move the horseshoe crabs over into it, it would still be useful to have it ready to go as a backup and for the couple-week period when students in General Biology are learning about marine invertebrates.

And really, what's more fun, writing an exam, or rehousing the marine invertebrates?

This batch unfortunately arrived a month too early, so they may not all survive until it's time for students to work with them. So we'd better enjoy them now, while we can. Another batch is apparently supposed to arrive on time.

It's hard to take photos through running water, but here are a sea pansy (purple, upper left), urchin, and red-footed sea slugs:



This is some sort of wee ghost crab:



We got a decorator crab with this batch, too! So cute!


As I watched, the ghost crab decided to go and antagonize the decorator crab:


Crabs be crabbin'. So I put the decorator crab into its own separate little container.

One of the tubs, overall:


The tube delivers water into the tub, and the overflow drips out into the main basin of the flow-through tank. This is a pretty good setup for ensuring the water stays well-oxygenated.

When I came back in this morning, the power to the flow-through pump was out, and I also realized it's maybe not a good idea to have the bivalves in with the predatory whelks, so I moved the tiny clams over to a separate tub.

Hermit crab on top of some sort of giant barnacle:


If you look closely, you might notice that this hermit crab's shell has a wee anemone on it. So cute!

Sponges, snails, and an urchin, oh my! And yes, another hermit crab, if you look closely again.


I got home pretty late from the surprise animal rehousing, so in turn I once again failed to get up for rowing practice, sigh. This has just been a rough week.

Today it would be way more fun to spend the day trying to draw these critters, instead of what I should be doing, which is using this precious time to work on manuscript-writing.

But manuscript-writing it is. Eyes on the prize, or something.

Since we are 150 miles north of Manhattan, we are not getting impacted by the current blizzard to the same extent as the city. Nonetheless, we're seeing a fair amount of snow and blustery wind, and this time at least my institution decided to cancel all classes up through noon. They issued the cancellation message last night at 9 pm, which made for a pretty quick pivot for me. In turn, I canceled my plans to try and go to rowing practice this morning, and instead got up early to start making Even More Lecture Videos for Animal Physiology.

The problems are, videos are large files, and my home upload speed is pretty throttled, so it has taken almost an hour to upload the first, shorter video (~1 Gb file; 15 minute recording). I have downsampled the video quality for the second, longer video accordingly (30 minute recording), but I am barely going to have it uploaded ahead of the scheduled start time for the class. In many respects that doesn't matter, because when classes are canceled technically we cannot hold a scheduled class session. But on a more practical level, that means I really can't go anywhere until the video finishes uploading.



So far it looks like the plows have hit the primary roads (emergency vehicle access for fire fighting and hospitals), but not yet the secondary or tertiary roads; I can see one of each road type from my windows at home.

...and as the morning progresses, I'm also noticing that unmistakable throat lymph node sensation suggesting I'm fighting off illness. Quick, to the medicine cabinet! That also means it's probably most prudent to just plan on staying home and recording and uploading yet another lecture video to replace my afternoon bicycling class meeting.

...and now there's another long wait for that one to upload, too.

Here's hoping that people actually watch them and find them useful. It's not an ideal method but still far better than nothing!

There are a lot of things these days reiterating the points that doing things like reading real books and going to class in person work better and have more benefits than over-reliance on digital learning tools. To many of us, this is not a surprise. I treat the digital learning tools as accessory to learning, and that seems to be a reasonable approach, based on my learning assessments.

[I started out writing this bit of preamble below, but as you'll observe, I then found I had a lot of things to remark about, after all!]

It was a busy one, but a lot of the busy-ness wasn't particularly remarkable. I guess some weeks in life are just like that.

Tuesday's lab involved the characterization of breathing in fish and reptiles. It is always a long lab that takes the full 4 hours for each lab section, because it involves gradually warming the animals up to see how temperature affects their breathing rates (fun fact, breathing volumes in both groups don't change very much, so their primary method for getting more oxygen as metabolic demands increase is to breathe faster). We also investigate how hypoxia, and in the case of the reptiles, hypercapnia (elevated carbon dioxide), affect breathing rates. This year I tried to emphasize the distinction between fish and reptile responses; fish show a pretty clear and dramatic response to low oxygen, and in species that can, it will often cause a switch to air-breathing. In contrast, like us and other terrestrial animals, reptiles respond much more quickly and dramatically to hypercapnia.

Wrangling the reptiles is always a wild card. Here's Gary the Gehrrosaurus major with a small piece of tape as a largely symbolic restraint against wiggling:



Sometimes he has an opinion about being cooled down, but most of the time he is exceptionally chill. This year, though, we observed that he has learned my ways when it comes to hypoxia and hypercapnia exposure! The way I expose each reptile to a different air composition is by using a gas pump to flow air through a 60-mL syringe with the plunger removed; I have students put the open end of the syringe barrel in front of the reptile's face for a few seconds at a time so that most of the air the reptile is getting is coming from the syringe. We start out just exposing each reptile to room air, then I plug a gas bag full of either nitrogen (hypoxia) or carbon dioxide (hypercapnia) into the gas pump. In general, our reptiles respond very quickly and dramatically to hypercapnia, but not by breathing faster: they instead hold their breath, aka use apnea to avoid the high carbon dioxide.

Well. This time around, when we brought the syringe near Gary's face, before changing the gas composition, he just went straight to apnea. It was a repeatable response, too. I think we tried it three times. So I had to conclude that Gary has learned my tricks over the years, and we had to skip that part of the lab.

Now, in contrast to Gary, here's an Anole:


I have stopped trying to acquire Anoles for now, because it's really hard to keep them happy in our lab setup. I think I just haven't managed to dial in the humidity correctly for them. But they're adorable, and also a lot more wiggly than Gary. So they require both a more delicate touch, and more taping so they stay in place.

The leopard geckos and skink, however, are usually the most challenging reptiles to work with. For several years I've been trying to use some gauze so we aren't directly putting masking tape onto reptile skin, but this year we went back to just straight-up tape, because the gauze method gives the reptiles just a little too much leeway to wiggle loose. We then use mineral oil to free the reptiles from the tape at the end of the procedure.

One of the three leopard geckos was pretty well-behaved this year (Shadow Luna, named by the students). Trinity and Baby Gramps, however...Trinity tried to bite me while I was trying to free her at the end, and Baby Gramps actually succeeded in drawing blood this time around. At least he didn't bite a student!

I kind of wish this bite mark would turn into a scar, because that would make it feel a little more worthwhile: a little, circular gecko bite scar.



I doubt that will actually happen, though.

Anyway, also on the lab front, towards the end of the week, two packages I'd been concerned about safely arrived. Whew. One contained a small bottle of citrated cow's blood, which we're after for the fresh hemoglobin it contains. The other contained two more horseshoe crabs!



These are Gulf crabs, and the styrofoam box they arrived in had a big sign on it that said to keep it at or above 70°F. When I opened the box...let's just say the crabs definitely weren't at 70°F. Sigh. They sat somewhere significantly colder than that for a while on their journey north from Florida. Sigh. After a bit of time to warm up, they started to perk up, so I added them in with the last one of last year's crabs, as pictured above. If Methusalah makes it until Tuesday, that will be the first time I've managed to keep a crab going for the entire year. I'm trying to do the best I can with them, but it's difficult in the midst of 500 other responsibilities.

--

So then on Thursday, my institution had an all-day symposium that's part of a series titled, "Earth's Cry, Humanity's Call," motivated by the Laudato Sí encyclical letter written and released by Pope Francis, calling for people to take action in the face of global environmental crises. I somehow wound up as a faculty representative on the symposium's organizing committee, so it seemed like a good idea to attend as much of the symposium as I could. (As a faculty rep I feel like I played only a bit part in the organizing, but it was still an important bit part because it involved recruiting colleagues and students from our School of Science to participate). The theme for the year was focused on "integral community development," which is also a focus of my institution's Business School, so the sessions were on a series of topics related to business and finance, but notably, NOT "make as much money as humanly possible at any cost." I wasn't able to go to the first session of the morning, but the second session featured a speaker named Kirsten Moy, who has recently been working to apply ideas from complexity science to community development.

So, that got to be pretty interesting. Just to point out why, at one point while she was giving an overview of what complexity science is, she listed "Ant Colonies" as her topmost example of a complex system. I was reminded of the time I spent interacting with colleagues in graduate school as part of our institution's Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and I've also known multiple people who have spent time at the Santa Fe Institute engaged in that sort of work. Anyway, here's an interview with Kerstin in the event you're interested in understanding more about her analysis of why lots of community development initiatives wind up having all sorts of unintended consequences (tied to thinking about communities as complex systems).

I could go on, but really, the overall consequence of the symposium on Thursday was that it led to a second weeknight where I didn't leave campus until after 8 pm (also happened on Tuesday because I had a rowing club online Board Meeting immediately after the back-to-back 4-hour labs ended, sigh).

Other than those items, we've reached a point in the semester where a good number of my Animal Physiology students have realized that they could maybe benefit from some more help with their statistical thinking and decision-making. This is really, really great for them to be realizing, but it also means very busy office hours for me. And a lot of what happens in those office hours isn't particularly new or interesting. But hey, that's just often the nature of teaching life.

In mid-December I was asked if I'd be willing to join my institution's Strategic Planning Committee. I ultimately agreed, although not without some reservations. I learned from a previous committee experience that for me, some committees are preferable over others. Anyway, the Strategic Planning Committee is going to be an interesting committee and process to be a part of, although I'll also admit I'm a little sad because it meant I had to give up my seat on a different committee that's more pedagogically focused, and I was appreciating the opportunity to be involved in discussions related to pedagogy. But I may very well get back to that committee once this iteration of the strategic planning process winds down. And both types of work are clearly needed and important.

Meanwhile, there are aspects of strategic planning processes and outcomes that I somewhat viscerally, vehemently dislike. We have been asked to read over our institution's prior strategic plan as an initial homework assignment. That plan was structured around four identified "pillars" and from reading through things it seems I may have some major and fundamental issues with the entire "experience" pillar. And anyway, the strategic planning document is the sort of thing where I can handle reading a page or two of it at a time, then I need to run off and rampage on other things for a while (e.g. blog! Whee!).

In the meantime, all of this is doing some of what it needs to do, to me. I remember hearing about some events and activities during the previous strategic planning process, but at that time I was checked out of that sort of thing so I wasn't necessarily thinking in these broader terms (was paying more attention to things like earning tenure, surviving teaching, rebuilding the rowing club).

Since I have a larger stake now, that means doing things like asking, "So, how have things gone at the large public university where I got my PhD back in the day, where the institution's president showed up in 2003 with a Big Vision?" (short answer, that Big Vision did indeed transform that institution; it does appear that institution is doing fine and/or well, although that's always a complicated matter to answer). Also continuing to keep tabs on the institution where I earned my bachelor's degree, because it, too, has made some major (and effective-seeming) strategic changes over the years (i.e. it's financially solvent and now able to offer a full scholarship to any incoming student with family income under $150k, but who knows where it is with regards to institutional elitism these days).

Now, these are both quite different institutions from my current one with regards to institution size and prestige, but one of my concerns with this committee is making sure to cast a very wide net when we're thinking about what needs to happen in the future, and my observation is there's a tendency at my institution to be WAY too parochial in our thinking (I kind of see this crop up again and again in the northeastern United States; folks, this country is much bigger than that, Los Angeles isn't a quaint Western backwater).

And in the meantime, I'm thinking, I think I personally need to seek out and get some legal observer training. I think I might also want to learn how to become an election monitor. One of the things that stood out to me from reading about my PhD institution is how its leader talks about helping the institution do a better job of responding to the needs of the broader community it serves. (by contrast, my institution's strategic plan is focused more directly on the students themselves, and only talks about "the broader world" in sweeping generalities).

Anyway, I should get back to reading the next two pages of this document. We shall see how it all goes. Hopefully it will have been a good decision all around to have joined this particular undertaking.

On Tuesday I had some errands to run around campus, and noticed that one of the banners hanging up to advertise our institution said some version of FrancisCAN (we are a Catholic Franciscan institution).

It just got me wondering, is there anything FrancisCANNOT? :^D

This is actually one of the best slogans I've seen here. And that actually winds up being crucial to consider, because one of the things a recent marketing study identified for us is that we haven't been as effective as we need to be at our shameless acts of self-promotion. I'm pretty interested in helping the institution succeed, so this matters, a lot.

What I like about FrancisCAN is that it lets us highlight everything we teach and enable our students and graduates to do. Which is a whole lot of different and excellent things, ahem.

The first day of the spring semester is always a little funny for me, because it's a Tuesday and usually I teach labs on Tuesdays, but I don't want to start the semester with a lab.

Instead I get to do fun things like get my syllabus photocopied and Muppet-flail about how very soon my time will no longer belong to me.

I only just learned about this paper (note, opens a PDF). It was apparently published in The Annals of Improbable Research, but my introduction was via a link to a talk the author gave, here: https://youtu.be/yL_-1d9OSdk?si=YyldHEMEdFnW2uY7

I wonder how long it took the author to compose the paper.

I am currently reading Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes because while teaching General Biology I got to thinking I could stand to learn and think some more specifically about prokaryotes. Sure, I'm a biologist, but I definitely don't know everything there is to know about biology! Far from it.

Somewhat hilariously, some of the earliest parts of the book turned out to be exceptionally ho-hum to me, but I think this is just because I spend a lot of my waking hours thinking and reading about a wide range of topics in biology, and those already often include a lot of the big Microbial Gee-Whiz concepts/discoveries/facts. So I appreciated how Yong can write eloquently and enthusiastically about the topics, but they land a little differently for someone who is going, "Okay, and now what?" I mean, aren't Wolbachia kind of old news?*

But last night I got to the chapter about milk. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but I learned things, and it was really fun to read because I'd just read about how seal milk contains even more complex oligosaccharides than human milk. (okay, small spoiler, Yong pokes at the question of, "Okay, but what are all those oligosaccharides in milk actually doing, because they aren't directly nourishing the baby, turns out!").

Somewhere in the midst of it all, I also only just learned that milk is basically modified sweat. That actually made a whole lot of things make a whole lot more sense to me, finally! Like specifically, how there are animals that can produce milk, except not with mammary glands? I believe there are even some insects that can produce milk. Also, isn't it both hilarious and gross to think about milk as modified sweat?

Fun things to think about over lunch.

We shall see what the next chapters of Yong's book bring. I'm glad I continued reading.

--
*If you're an insect biologist, you need to know about Wolbachia. But yes, Wolbachia are weird and complicated to think about, so I'm definitely not teaching about Wolbachia in an introductory course!

People here in Albany, NY have been feverishly checking the weather and school closure lists since yesterday afternoon. When I headed over to rowing practice, my institution hadn't canceled anything, and everything was quiet and clear. Promptly at 8 am, while I was finishing a cup of coffee with teammates at our favorite local coffee hangout, the snow started.

My institution still hadn't called it, so I started to head towards campus. By the time I reached the end of Van Rensselaer Boulevard to turn onto Route 378 by the Albany Rural Cemetery, it was snowing hard enough that I could barely see where I was going (glasses-on *or* glasses-off), and I wasn't relishing the thought of climbing up and then flying down curvy, narrow Schuyler Road while not really being able to see and in increasingly slippery conditions.

So I pulled over and messaged my students to let them know that we'd be pivoting to video instruction. It wasn't even so much the immediate conditions as the thought of how much worse things were likely to get for the eventual trip home.

I'm pretty sure my students are fine with this decision. I'd messaged them yesterday anyway, to tell my commuting students they should use their best judgment about whether or not to come in to campus, and to note that we'd pivot to video if classes were canceled.

And so I'll spend the rest of the day at home, with some Zoom meetings interspersed, playing the Lofi Hip Hop channel and grading student papers while the cats snooze on their heating pads.

This heating pad is a new acquisition, but a little catnip seems to have persuaded George to give it a try.





Cozy AF in here. Dunno why my institution thinks it's a good idea to have students and employees out on the roads today.