On November 17th Jessica successfully defended her thesis on ‘thermal landscapes’ and rattlesnake migration”.  Congratulations, Jess.

Jared’s & Stephanie’s work on rattlesnakes was featured on Global TV.  Click here.

An article from the Globe & Mail (May 2015) on the salaries and credentials of wildlife biologists.  Click HERE.

Several people in our lab were featured in a story on the conservation issues facing rattlesnakes in British Columbia.  Click HERE.

For the fourth year in a row, we conducted a mid-summer live-trapping survey for small mammals across the Osoyoos snake study site.  This year Jared Maida (sitting in the middle on the truck bumper) did a great job of organizing the gala event.  As always, captures were not high in the dry desert, although one site on the side of a hill produced a fair number of pocket mice.  With the trapping coinciding with the shortest nights of the year, everyone averaged about 4.5 hrs of sleep/night for three days, so a HUGE thanks to our super volunteers…

In the picture, left to right:  Jennifer (volunteer), Valerie (volunteer), Yours Truly, Kirstin (kneeling), Cole (volunteer), Jared, Janna (volunteer), and Steph (volunteer).

I found this while stumbling around the internet today.  Good advice to follow if you want to give a really bad scientific presentation, which many people seem to aspire to.

Here’s the link:    http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=18403

Emily Lomas now has a paper from her thesis in press with the journal Animal Conservation.  The title of the paper is “Persistence of Northern Pacific Rattlesnakes masks the impact of human disturbance on weight and body condition”.

Cheryl Blair just returned from the 3rd Conference of the North American Pika Consortium in Golden, Colorado, where she presented an overview of her thesis work entitled ‘Survival in a low elevation, human-modified landscape: the American Pika’.  Cheryl also was co-author on another talk led by our collaborators, Matthew Waterhouse and Mike Rusello from UBC-Okanagan (Genetic evidence for restricted dispersal in American pika across a human-modified landscape).

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0FDjFBj8o[/youtube]

Something all graduate students should watch!