https://www.bucknell.edu/news/seabirds-sentinels-bucknell-researchers-make-national-geographic

This Bucknell news story is a preface to the August issue of National Geographic, which will feature a story about Middleton Island’s seabird research. The wildly talented and fun Mo Heim, extraordinary person and wildlife photographer, spent a few weeks out there with us in summer 2022, and her incredible photos earned Middleton a Nat Geo story. One of the themes of the story is the role of Middleton as a training ground for young scientists, and our very own lab alum Sierra Pete (MS ’23) is featured in a gorgeous 2-page photo spread, and provided the closing quotation for the story. The headline above makes me giggle because while I AM mentioned by name and affiliation in the article, the quotation is about the (challenges of) field camp hygiene, rather than featuring any profound scientific insights! But I am thrilled to see the island, birds, and the people who study them spark more widespread interest in others. It’s an amazing place/ecosystem/community and I’m so lucky to be able to work there.

Stephanie Walsh (BA Biology/Psychology, ’24) gave an outstanding thesis defense in April, crafting a talk rich in visuals, accessible to the many non-scientist friends and family who attended, and impressive/interesting to the many scientists in the audience. Her analysis of parental responsiveness to chick behaviors (including the ethogram of parental behaviors that she created), and the finding that it seems to vary by both parent and chick sex, reflects hundreds of hours of work by Steph, and will serve as a foundation for future work in the lab. Sending her off to a MS program in Psychology at NYU. You will be missed, Steph!

I am on sabbatical for academic year 2023/2024. Things are relatively quiet in the lab, as I am using this time to catch up on paper writing (trying to resist collecting more data when the existing data need to emerge into the world!). That said, undergraduates Stephanie Walsh (’24), Alex Le (’24) and I are preparing for presentations at the 2024 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (“SICB”) conference in January in Seattle.

{Please note that I am not taking any graduate students for AY 24/25.}

Graduates. The lab lost 3 outstanding seniors last year: Steph Lin graduated early, at the end of Fall 2021, and Taiba Khan and Eadaoin Kelly both graduated at the end of the academic year. Steph and Eadaoin (“A-deen”) presented their research about the effects of investigator disturbance on kittiwake chick growth and physiology (TLDR: They are pretty robust to research activities!), with Steph presenting a poster as a remote attendee at the Pacific Seabird Group meeting in February, and Eadaoin presenting a poster at Bucknell’s Kalman Research Symposium in March. Taiba finished up her time in the lab by organizing and interacting multiple large data sets to create a master data file that will be used for years to come, and testing hypotheses about sex differences in chick behavior (and parental responsiveness to it). We weathered the COVID rollercoaster together and I will miss all of them!

Sierra Pete is writing up her thesis, and was hired by the Institute of Seabird Research and Conservation to serve as the site lead for the second half of the season with this year’s Middleton Island (AK) research team, coordinating the logistics and research for the 8-10 person crew and the dozens of seabird projects happening out there this year. She is doing an outstanding job. Morgan spent ~2 weeks on Middleton with that fantastic crew – her first time there without any field assistants and boy did she feel the loss acutely (Eyuel, Mae, Paige, Eadaoin – I really missed you!).

The lab will be small this coming year, as a sabbatical break is coming, but Alex Le, Ali Jackson and I are looking forward to some productive science.