Test Your Dirt!

I've started a citizen science project called Test Your Dirt, to investigate levels of heavy metals in urban gardens!

Urban gardening is a fantastic way to produce food and bring communities together, but urban soil can sometimes contain high levels of heavy metals from roads, industrial activities, or old buildings with lead pipes or lead paint.

Test Your Dirt is a partnership between McMaster University and the Hamilton Community Garden Network, and funded by a Forward with Integrity Grant. We will provide free kits to test for heavy metals in garden soil, and then compile the results for a public report.

Our aim is to increase awareness about heavy metals in urban gardens, and promote clean and healthy urban gardening!

If you're interested in getting a free test kit and contributing to this project, please feel free to contact me, or contact Test Your Dirt!

A few photos from Point Pelee

Most of my research revolves around fish, and I definitely have a soft spot for fish and fishing. However, I like anything to do with the outdoors! This weekend I had a great time checking out some of the bird migration at Point Pelee. We were a bit early, and the weather was still a bit cold and windy, but there were still lots of birds...and some other wildlife viewing!

Lots of blue-headed vireos. This one posed nicely for photos!

Brown creeper. 

Eastern kingbird. 

We saw lots of warblers, including Blackburnian warblers, yellow warblers, magnolia warblers, blue-winged warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, chestnut-sided warblers, and black-throated green warblers, but warblers are hard to photograph! I don't have a great zoom lens (especially by bird photography standards), and I need a warbler to be remarkably cooperative to get a good portrait. This palm warbler was kind to me!

And some other wildlife, in and around the National Park. A cold garter snake is a much easier subject to photograph than a warbler. 

Muskrat!

And finally, a raccoon who was surprised by the early morning birders!

Science writing PDFs now available on my website

For the past few years, I have really enjoyed dipping my toe into the world of science communication by writing "Outside JEB" articles. These short articles, published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, highlight new research that will be of interest to the readers of the journal. While I have been having fun writing these articles, I have realized that I should probably also do more to make my articles more available to anyone interested in reading them.

And so, in the spirit of increasing science communication, I have uploaded PDFs of all of my "Outside JEB" articles to my website!

These articles cover a range of topics, from the importance of early social learning in cowbirds to how crabs choose a home. Check it out if you're interested in learning more about recent research in the general fields of physiology, behaviour, and conservation!

Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting is always a great time. It's a big academic conference with stimulating talks and lots of great networking opportunities. The year the meeting was attended by over 2000 scientists at all levels, from undergraduate students to professors, in downtown Austin, Texas. Here's the view of the bars and restaurants on 6th Street from my hotel window!

The highlight of the meeting for me was a series of special sessions honouring Dr. John Wingfield's pioneering work on field endocrinology. Dr. Wingfield took endocrinology from the lab and started asking questions about circulating hormones in wild birds from the arctic to the tropics, exploring the patterns of circulating hormones change during reproduction and other challenges. His research changed the way that we think about stress in wild animals, and developed the foundation for conservation physiology.

At the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, the talks in the special sessions featured advances that have been made in field endocrinology, and highlighted where the field is headed. Many of the talks emphasized that we need to understand reaction norms in order to better understand how selection is operating on endocrine systems. A great talk by Dr. Britt Heidinger highlighted that telomere shortening might explain the long-term effects of developmental stress, while Dr. Micheal Romero presented a model showing that populations under stress disproportionately reply on the oldest and highest quality individuals for persistence. Check out the abstract book for full details of all of the talks!