Articles by Categories

Our Ecosystems

• 3 Reasons Why What You Grow in Your Garden Matters
• How a cattle vaccine helped save giraffes
• Do we have all the data needed to make safe choices about seafood?
• Is it possible to eat too much fish?
• Single Large or Several Small? The Ongoing Debate in Nature Preserve Design
• Moving away from monoculture in aquaculture
• Some people just love plants (as long as they can afford them...)
• Life on the Edge: 3 Important Ways that Habitat Edges Affect Forests
• Are we running out of invasives?
• Ask your food for its DNA ID
• Finding wildfire’s niche in the Anthropocene
• The Earth is a blue marble (and the world is green)
• Four Unexpected Ways that Living in Cities Affects Wildlife
• 'Tis the Season for Citizen Science
• Fish are friends AND food
• Building with Microbes (In Mind)
• A thorny, venomous creature is terrorizing coral reefs
• Walking through Transitions
• How are forest insect outbreaks like wildfires?
• Sharing the ecosystem with wildlife - why getting outside is more important than ever
• The Mercurial Path of Mercury to Aquatic Ecosystems
• Nicotine Dreams - Baby Birds Protected by Cigarettes
• Drinking from the rivers and eating from the forests
• 4 ways humans harm the environment (when they are trying to help)
• Fishing Towards Conservation
• Marvel at Larval - An Appreciation for Young and Developing Fish
• Some Australians consider kangaroos to be pests. Surprised? So was I.
• A World without Birdsong
• It's Standing Room Only At The Equator

How It Works

• New Culture, New Microbiome, New Problems
• If Only There Were a U.S. Census Question About Biodiversity…
• How An Invasive Plant Helped Fuel The Largest Wildfire You’ve Never Heard Of
• Human Eye Structure Makes No Sense…Or Does It?
• The Price of Pigment on Your Immune System
• Midnight Snacks Could Be the Death of You
• Lobster Fight Club
• Making a Murderer - A Matter of Biology?
• Got Lactase? Breaking Down the Enzyme
• Why Do I Shiver When It’s Cold?
• Crap you didn’t really need to know
• You Can't Observe A Lot Just By Watching
• What Do You Do When It's Too Hot to Move?
• 5 Fun Facts about Hormones
• Death stinks - literally
• Why the sea salt fad could be very bad
• Henry's Pockets: A Poem
• Henry's Pockets: A Poem
• Biology Superpowers: X-Ray Vision
• How to Expand Your Senses by Reading a Blog Post
• What's up with bat echolocation?
• Seeing is Believing - How Can We Visualize Tiny Colorless Bacteria?
• Water balance in a man-made world
• Why Does Mopsy Eat Her Own Poop?
• Should I say sex or gender? Pt. 2
• Should I say sex or gender? Pt. 1
• How To Catch Hard-to-Catch Fish?
• Finding the Perfect Partner
• Mind over microbe
• Why Do Mothers Mother?
• GMO! The Places You'll Go!
• Really Old Fossils, Really Strong Predators, and Cool New Tech
• A Brief History of Evolutionary Thought, part III
• Saving face: transplanting our most distinctive features
• A Brief History of Evolutionary Thought, part II
• DNA - Nature’s Hard Drive
• Mitochondria: The Underrated Organelles
• Pollination 101
• You May Say I’m Biased, But I’m Not the Only One
• The Path of Least Resistance: Our Relationship with Antibiotics
• Estimating the Age of Life Long-Gone
• Know Your Limb-its
• Your Dog is a GMO Wolf
• Better Safe Than Sorry: The Pesticide Industry is Getting a Revamp
• The Bizarre Shopping List of a Determined Scientist
• Insects Get Sick Too: The Study of Insect Pathology
• Employee of the Month - Hire a Microbe to Do Your Work
• A Brief History of Evolutionary Thought - Part I
• Artificial Islands
• To B(PA) Or To Not B(PA): Regulating Endocrine Disruptors
• Fireflies of the Ocean: Lighting up the Dark with Science
• Charity cases in nature - when are animals more likely to be altruistic?
• Being selfish means staying alive
• Penguins and other strange things we study from space
• Pseudoreplication and the Art of Biological Statistics
• Why did orange prices increase?
• The Wonders of Fecal Transplants
• Calling the Shots - Discussing Vaccines
• 3D Printing for Fun and Science
• What is Phytopathology?
• Medical Mysteries Still Surrounding Zika Virus

Grad School Diaries

• Eureka!
• Standing on the shoulders of giants
• Tails from the Field: Studying Lemurs in Southwestern Madagascar
• Frankenstein: A ghost-story about scientific ethics and work-life balance
• Scottish Summer Surprises - Part 2!
• Lessons from My First Conference
• Scottish Summer Surprises (Part 1)!
• The Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting
• How Many Botanists Does it Take to ID an Orchid?
• A Baby Photo Book – For Fish!
• From Bill Nye to the ‘Average Joe’: The changing face of science communication
• Research Highlight - Making Brain Cells
• Extract DNA from any living thing
• Celebrity Sightings while Science-ing
• Breaks on Campus
• Awe-inspiring, but relatable – the goal of any science communication effort
• Secrets of the Soil: Searching for Stories from a Warming Climate
• A Fishtastic Journey Abroad
• Greetings from Michigan: American Ornithology Conference 2017
• What do cockroaches, power tools, and pollinator gardens have in common?
• Grad Students Meet Girl Scouts Part 2: Conserving Local Bee Habitats, One Person at a Time!
• A graduate student in elementary school
• Minding my Moth and Meandering in Malaysia
• Distilling Complexity in Three Minutes - The UMass 3MT Competition
• All My Friends Are Dead - A Day in the Museum Basement
• A Day In the Life of a Bird Nerd
• Salameandering – Searching the Southern Appalachians for Gummy Lizards
• You Are What You Eat – Measuring the Impact of Diet on Jaw Bone Growth in Fish, part I
• Spooky Science: When Nightmares Become Reality
• Spooky Science: When Nightmares Become Reality
• What I wish I had known: advice about graduate school (and life) to my younger self
• Trickle-Down Academics - Facing the Loss of the NSF DDIG in Biology
• Science for the Public – A Panel Discussion Hosted by TLS and OPD
• Chasing Fire - One Scientist’s Mission to Photograph Her Study Organism
• Field station memories
• An Office in the Great Outdoors: The joys and challenges of being an aquatic ecologist
• Is Milk Bad for Me? Finding Scientific Truths in the "Post-Truth" Era
• Sketch-noting the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology 2017 Meeting
• Sketch-noting the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology 2017 Meeting
• Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Science Cafe
• Art for Science - Science communication through art
• The Birds and the Beetles: Research Highlights from UMass Grad Students
• An American Graduate Student in France
• Science - A Universal Language
• I Get Knocked Down But I Get Up Again
• Science Outreach: “Inspiring all girls to be strong, smart & bold” with Plant Science!
• Why I chose to be a field ecologist
• Five Sentence Emails
• Life in the balance
• Welcome To That's Life [Science]
• Unexpected Encounters of the Human Kind

Earth's Organisms

• Celebrate the Holidays with a Decorative Parasite
• Sleeping One Hemisphere at a Time
• Through the Mycologist's Hand Lens: Deceptive Decomposers
• Life Science in Outer Space!
• 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Rats
• Watermelon Snow
• Critter Candid Cam
• Three Cool Plants in Hot Places
• A parasite only a moth could love
• Telling tales of plants and their names
• The Colorful World of Primate Hair
• Where do fish go in winter?
• You Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours
• Alien Microbes: How studying hyperthermophiles can help us discover life on other planets
• Life, the universe, and everything: Dreams of being a biophysicist
• Bug Sleuth – One Entomologist’s Mission to ID a Mysterious Swarm of Wasps
• Horny and Hungry: The Dilemma of Sexual Cannibalism
• Who’s who? The elusive difference between butterflies and moths
• Tuberculosis - A Romantic Disease?
• Ode to a Few Arachnids
• Monotropa uniflora - This wildflower is pretty wild
• Eavesdropping in the Animal Kingdom: Sneaky Creatures Just Trying to Get Ahead
• Trypanosomes - A Weird Pathogen You Haven't Heard Of
• A Beautiful 9/11 Tribute, but a Fiasco for Migratory Birds
• Cats can have AIDS, too.
• Part 2: Does catching Pidgeys help you notice Pigeons? Interviews with Pokémon Go Researchers
• Biodiversity in my Backyard: Encounters with Pidgeys and Dratinis, Part 1
• Fins, Limbs, Rays, and Digits – A Beginner’s Guide to Terrestrial Living
• Fins, Limbs, Rays, and Digits – A Beginner's Guide to Terrestrial Living
• Five things that really stink about the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug
• Tricks but no Treats - An Orchid’s Guide to Making a Fool of Your Pollinator
• Tracking the lost years - where do baby sea turtles grow?
• Posing as a Bird Mama: the adventures of a researcher-turned-bird-parent
• When Boys Become Men By Dancing
• The hungry caterpillar in real life
• Mantis Shrimp Vision - Seeing in Secret Code
• When It Comes to Bird Beaks - Size Matters
• Mind over microbe
• When a Wall is just a Wall
• May the Bees Be With You: Maintaining the Sweet Balance in Life
• Nematodes: The super microscopic animal!
• How Pistol Shrimp Kill with Bubbles
• Who needs males after all?
• Opposition Research on My Garden’s Greatest Nemesis
• Watching Your Every Move
• Slimed and Consumed - The Blob is Real!
• Lion in Sheep's Clothing
• Struggling to be Heard - Competition in a Complex Soundscape
• Invasive Species and Invasion: Part 1
• When, and how, terror birds invade
• 8 Reasons Plants Are Amazing
• How our obsession with cleanliness might be hurting our health
• Stop, evaluate, and listen - serotonin surges when a female is present
• No Teeth, Long Tongue, No Problem - Adaptations for Ant-eating
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Predators, Parasitoids, and Parasites
• If you don't care for your microbiome, you might want to start
• Culturing the Least Cultured Members of Society
• Hit the Road Jack
• What Happened to Your Nose?
• Building better plants - Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution
• Love Songs for Nobody - Birdsong in Winter
• The Evolution of Virulence
• The Unseen World – On Cheese?
• Find Me Where the Wild Things Are
• You won’t believe this simple trick to tell if your coral is healthy or not
• Cryptic Species Hide in Plain Sight
• Creature Feature - Pseudoscorpions
• World Fish Migration Day 2016!
• Walking With Giant Anteaters
• When A Sea Turtle Balanced Earth