New car!

Okay, for those of you who don't know, until yesterday evening I drove an inherited '99 Ford Crown Victoria to class everyday. I'm sure you saw it in the Science Center parking lot - it looked a whole lot like a police cruiser. However, thanks to the Cash for Clunkers program, I will now be sporting a 2009 Honda Fit, which gets more than double the gas mileage of the Crown Vic. As an environmentally-conscious person in every other facet of my life, this finally allows me to resolve that one less-than-environmentally-sound aspect. Now if only I can keep it clean after my students and I have been out in the field...

Hogan Institute

Over the course of the last 2 weeks I have been fortunate to be part of the Hogan Prep/Rockhurst Interdisciplinary Summer Institute. Drs. Annie Lee, Zdenka Guadarrama, Laura Salem, Rob Vigliotti and I, along with a group of wonderful Rockhurst students, hosted 18 students from Hogan Prep High School in Kansas City. We set out to give them the complete college experience by issuing them IDs, having them stay in the dorms and eat on campus the first week, and taking classes during the day, all the while working on a recycling project that they will implement at Hogan. The classes included biology, chemistry, math and philosophy; and more specifically to biology, students conducted molecular biology experiments during the first week with Dr. Salem (including isolating their own DNA!) and then conducted some organismal and field biology with me during the second week. The top picture shows the group who helped me track snakes yesterday while the bottom picture shows our small-mammal trapping team. We all had a blast and I think they learned a lot about science and philosophy, college life, and themselves along the way.

JMIH

I just returned from an outstanding conference, the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, in Portland, OR. Aside from the informative talks - there were 10 concurrent paper sessions every 15 minutes all day for 5 days and 100s of posters - the city was fantastic and it was great to reconnect with people I hadn't seen since last year or years past. I presented a poster concerning our rattlesnake relocation project and it was very well-received. Everyone was excited to see what we were doing here in KS and MO to conserve our wildlife and to help to preserve these creatures.