LSU Graduate Student Evolves as Winner Adam Leaché, a student of Jim McGuire, won the Ernst Mayr Award, for the best  student presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of  Evolution held in Knoxville, Tennessee, June 26 through July 1. The winning paper was: Molecular Systematics of the Eastern Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus): A Bayesian Approach. The study  was done as part of his M.S. degree work at San Diego State University, where he worked with Tod Reeder.  Leaché, was one of forty students in the competition., and it is unusual for the award to go to a first year  PhD student against the daunting competition.  One other Mayr Award this year went to a Harvard University student.  Leaché will receive $500 and a complete set of back issues of Systematic Biology. He follows in the footsteps of Jim McGuire (Museum of Natural Sciences) and Sharon Messenger (adjunct faculty member in the department), both of whom won the award when they were graduate students. Left. Adam Leaché  "won partly because of his clear explanation of the new and difficult Bayesian  phylogenetics method."... LSU Today. Right. Our understanding of the world is achieved more  effectively by conceptual improvements than by  discovery of new facts... Ernst Mayr

Taylor explains that the teleost genus Elacatinus, with 26 species in two subgenera, is the most diverse goby genus endemic to the Neotropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The members of Elacatinus occur on coral reefs of the Caribbean Sea and Bahamas, along the coast of central Brazil, and in the tropical eastern Pacific. Eight Caribbean species and four Pacific species are found along the CAI coast. Ecologically, Elacatinus range from brightly-colored parasite cleaners to cryptic reef dwellers, with several morphological modifications apparently associated with these different lifestyles, such as changes in mouth position and body size. This combination of high diversity, Neotropical endemism, and ecological diversification makes Elacatinus a superb taxon for testing many evolutionary and ecological hypotheses.

Undergraduate Heads North from Home  Frost Rollins will graduate at the end of the summer, about the time her first research paper  appears in Mycologia, the journal of the Mycological Society of America [Rollins, F., K. G. Jones, P. Krokene, H. Solheim, and M. Blackwell.  2001. Phylogeny of asexual fungi associated with bark and ambrosia beetles. Mycologia 93:991-996.]. She will enter graduate school at  Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, this fall.  Frost will work with evolutionary mycologist David Hibbett on a problem dealing with slime mold pylogenetics, a long term interest of hers.

Alumni news Looking southward from OMBS ridge Ouachita Mountains Biological Station (OMBS) Richard Speairs (MS, 1947; PhD, 1957) worked with mycologist Bernard Lowy.  As Professor Emeritus in Biological Sciences at LSU Shreveport, he has been devoting a great deal of time and resources to a field station located near Mina, Arkansas, the Ouachita Mountains Biological Station has served collegiate needs as a research and educational center since 1962. Elevation ranges from approximately 395 to 622 m. The area is a mixed pine hardwood forest depending upon the degree and orientation of the slope. Dominant tree species include shortleaf pine, post oak, black oak, blackjack oak, southern red oak, and sweetgum with dogwood, downy serviceberry, American hornbeam, eastern hophornbeam, and winged elm in the understory.  Within a fifty mile radius several endemic species of salamanders may be found." The station has several buildings, including a laboratory, guest house, and shop, and a new building is under construction. The Speairs also have a cabin on the site.  The catalogued collections of the museum are listed online and provide an idea of the organisms that are found in the region. The Ouachita Mountains Biological Station, Inc., qualifies for charitable donations and tax deductions.  Please contact  Dr. Richard K. Speairs, Jr., (Mar. 1 - Nov. 30) Route 1, P.O. Box 281, Polk Road 615, Mena, AR 71953, telephone (501) 394-3956, or (Dec. 1 - Feb. 28) P. O. Box 5568, Shreveport, LA 71105-5568, telephone (318) 861-6059 Home or (318) 795-4200.  Dr. Laurence M. Hardy, can be contacted by e-mail or at the Museum of Life Sciences, LSU in Shreveport, One University Place, Shreveport, LA 71115-2399, telephones (318) 797-5338 Work, (318) 687-6738 Home, (318) 797-5338 FAX.  David Longstreth notes that the latest volume of the Annual Review of Plant Physiology and Plant Molecular Biology  (52 for 2001) contains articles by Xuemin (Sam) Wang and Anthony (Tony) J. Kinney, both former post docs with  Tom Moore at  LSU in what was then the Department of Botany.  Wang is now Professor of  Biochemistry at Kansas State University and Kinney is a Principal Investigator at the Dupont Agricultural Experiment Station. La Donna Jarrell , who completed a degree plant biology in 1996, works at IMB in North Carolina where she is one of the lead developers for a new product, WebSphere Transcoding Publisher .  Links to alumni Several more postdoc alumni have been added since last month.

Mohamed Noor  writes more about the meeting where Adam Leaché won the Ernst Mayr Award: LSU-Biological Sciences made an incredible showing at the joint meetings of  the Society for the Study of Evolution, American Society of Naturalists, and Society of Systematic Biologists annual meeting, held in Knoxville, Tennessee, 26 June - 1 July.  There were approximately 1100 attendees from around the world, and over 1% were from LSU.   Noor organized this year's SSE symposium, Speciation and Reinforcement , in which he, Michael Hellberg, and five others spoke. Rob Moyle, Mike Taylor, Chris Witt, Jim McGuire, and Sharon Messenger gave talks in contributed sessions. David Foltz and Ben Marks presented posters.  Also attending were Lori Benson, Tom Devitt, Jessica Light, Frank Burbrink, Mark Hafner, and David Pollock.  Several recent LSU alumni including David Reed and David McClellan  were at the meeting.

 

Phycologists were called to Estes Park, where they survived white water rafting Chlamydomonas reinhardtii mutants that require elevated CO2 for optimal  growth.  S.L. Colombo, S.V. Pollock, K. Eger, C.B. Mason, and J.V. Moroney. Phragmoplast-mediated cytokinesis in non-charophycean green algae --Is it homologous to the process in streptophytes? R.L. Chapman, M.C. Henk, O. Borkhsenious, and D.A. Waters.

• Rocha-Olivares A., J. W. Fleeger, and D. W. Foltz.  2001.  Decoupling of molecular and morphological evolution in deep lineages of a meiobenthic harpacticoid copepod.  Mol. Biol. Evol.  18: 1088-1102.
• Millward R. N., J. W. Fleeger, D. D. Reible, K. A. Keteles, B. P. Cunningham, and L. Zhang.  2001.  Pyrene bioaccumulation, effects of pyrene exposure on particle-size selection, and fecal pyrene content in oligochaete Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri (Tubificidae, Oligochaeta).  Environ. Toxicol. Chem.  20: 1359-1366.
• Zhu, B.C.R., G. Henderson, F. Chen, L. Maistrello, and R.A. Laine. 2001. Nootkatone is a repellent for Formosan Subterranean Termites.  J. Chemical Ecology 27: 523-531.

The Department of Botany in 1984    Kneeling or sitting in front: Jim Grace and Bruce Williamson. Standing or sitting in the semicircle, clockwise: Russell Chapman, Lowell Urbatsch, Tom Moore, Jim Moroney, Meredith Blackwell, David Longstreth, and Shirley Tucker.  Jim Grace moved to the Wetlands Research Center, USGS, Lafayette, Louisiana, and Shirley Tucker retired and moved to Santa Barbara, California, where she continues her research at the University of California.  The other botanists are still at LSU.  This photograph was taken by an LSU photographer on stone and concrete steps near the Greek Theater stage. The photograph was rediscovered during an office cleanup.