Post-Thanksgiving

It was 81 degrees last week when I landed in Houston and now I'm sitting in my office, wearing my puffy coat.  It's quite the climatic transition.  It was great to be home for a few days and see my family (my niece and my parents' pygmy goats are pictured here).  I hope you all got to do the same, perhaps minus the pygmy goats.
Now we're all getting back in the swing of things.  I just gave the last lab practical for my Monday Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy lab section and graded their cat dissections.  They did a phenomenal job with their dissections this semester, as did my Friday lab students, and I am always sad to see a semester of "Comp Vert" lab end.  However, in the spring I'll be teaching Evolution, Anatomy & Physiology, and Biology Field Trip; so there is plenty to which to look forward.

Thanksgiving week

Since we have an abbreviated week, this will be an abbreviated blog post.  I will be going back to Texas over the break to see my family, so I thought now would be a perfect time to include a recent pic of my niece.  She just turned a year old, and this is a picture of her staring at a ball python at the pet store.  She's already interested in snakes and adores animals, so I'd say she's off to a great start!

Honeysuckle battle!

On Saturday, Linda Lehrbaum and I led a group of gung-ho Rockhurst students as they worked to rid the beautiful glade at Swope Park of invasive brush honeysuckle.  This was a Kansas City Wildlands workday, and the work group was comprised entirely of Rockhurst Plant Biology and honors students.  They were hardcore workers, not bothered by the manual labor, the cold wind or the overcast skies (or the fact that they had to get up early on a Saturday).  The picture shows the group, saws crossed, proudly posed in front of one of many piles of conquered honeysuckle. 
The next KCWildlands event, on December 3rd, is described below.  Please come out to Olathe to pick out and cut down your very own Christmas tree while at the same time helping to decrease the local population of invasive native red cedars!

This weekend my research student and I drove to Wichita, KS, to attend the Kansas Herpetological Society Annual Meeting.  He presented a paper yesterday concerning the evolutionary history and classification of a group of small snakes that are relatively common in the Midwest.  He did a great job (unsurprisingly) and we gleaned quite a bit from the other talks as well.  We also felt the earthquake on Saturday night, which was a really bizarre experience for us both.

One of the best parts of my job is taking undergraduate research students to professional conferences to present their original research.  This was especially exciting because our project may have taxonomic implications (i.e. our work may divide one recognized species of snake into two).  We plan to do some further research, which we initiated this morning, and publish a paper about the study next semester.

Fast Food Nation

Last night, Dr. Evans, Caitlin M. (a senior Biology major) and I attended the Diversity Access & Equity Social Justice Book and Lecture series at UMKC.  The speaker was Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation - you should absolutely read it or see the movie if you have a chance - and co-producer of Food, Inc. (I strongly recommend this one, too).  In his talk last night he discussed the fast food industry and drew numerous parallels between its motives and operations and those of the tobacco industry.  This was an interesting and provocative analogy and led audience members to ask some rather deep questions.  It was an enjoyable and informative evening and we hope to attend another of these talks in the future.