Biodiversity Blog
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Meet Stengl Wyer Scholar: Liming Cai
Liming Cai is one of our 2021 Stengl-Wyer Scholars. She is a systematic biologist broadly interested in the study of phylogenetics and evolutionary genomics of plants. Her research integrates fieldwork, herbarium collections, and genomic analysis to characterize the patterns and drivers of biodiversity. As part of the Stengl Wyer Endowment, th... 
Pets as Invasive Species: Fish Gone Wild
by Nicole Elmer and Adam Cohen, Ichthyology Collection Manager Illustration: Nicole Elmer Pet fish may not purr and curl up in your lap or bark when they see you, but because of their colors, anatomy, and behaviors they can be interesting and beautiful to observe in their aquariums or backyard ponds. But sometimes their owners decide...Through the Herbarium Cabinet: a Student View of the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center
by Sarah Hunter
This summer, through the ongoing haze of the COVID-19 global pandemic, I had the unique opportunity to explore the inner workings of the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at UT. The Herbarium Curation Summer Graduate Fellowship program allowed me three months of hands-on training in the varied aspects of herbarium curat... 
A Case for Eels
Hannah Chapman Tripp helps set the specimen jar. (Photo: Adam Cohen) The Life Science Library on the second floor of the Main Building is something to behold. With its high ceilings displaying quotations in gold paint, to the massive chandeliers, some have likened it to Hogwarts, the fictional British boarding school of magic in J.K. Rowli...
Pets as Invasive Species, an Introduction
Lucy (back) and Olive (front), two out of three of the author's feline invasive species. Humans have pets for lots of reasons. Companionship, protection, admiration of the animal’s beauty, an excuse to get outside for a walk. As much as we don’t want to hear it, our beloved Fido or Snowball, when mismanaged, can become invasive and threaten biod...History of UT Herpetology, Part 2: Mike Ryan's Work on Amphibian Communication
A male Túngara frog. (Photo: Ryan Taylor)
Herpetology at UT really kicked into gear when William Frank Blair arrived in 1946. Our first blog in this series looked at his influence on herpetology research and the Herpetology Collection. Here, we’ll review some of Blair’s work on frog communication, and how this focus carried into the presen... The Delicate Unseen World
A small example of groundwater species. (Gilbert & Culver, 2009, Freshwater Biology)
When we think about biodiversity, we often imagine life on ground, in the sea and air. Rarely do we think about biodiversity being in places we can’t see.
Beneath our feet, there are water sources with vast amounts of life, species being discovered, and spec... 
Featured Species: Slenderhead Darter (Percina phoxocephala)
by Melissa Casarez and Adam Cohen (Ichthyology Collection) Illustration: Joseph Tomelleri The Slenderhead Darter occurs throughout the Mississippi River basin, and only exists in Texas in tributaries of the Red River. It was first documented in TX in 1994 by UT biologists Laurie Dries and David Hillis in Sanders Creek, a...
Saving Water Damaged Species
by Viv Shu (undergraduate Museum Studies Certificate student and Sustainability major) Living plants need water to survive, but dried museum specimens of plants are exactly the opposite! The Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center houses more than 1,000,000 such herbarium specimens in the Main Building. This 85+ year-old landmark, also known as the...
Meet Stengl-Wyer Fellow: Alex Nishida
Alex isolating bacterial strains from the gut microbiomes of captive great apes. The Stengl-Wyer Endowment supports year-long fellowships for doctoral candidates pursuing dissertation research in the area of Diversity of life and organisms in their natural environments. Recipients will receive a 12-month stipend of $34,000, f...
Sorting Fish
Those preserved specimens in natural history collections didn't get into their jars or drawers on their own. Quite a bit of work was involved, not only in the field, but also in the lab. This time lapse video from the Ichthyology Collection shows one of the first steps, sorting the specimens into jars.
The Power of Poop
We all know poop. When it comes to plants, we might think of poop as the manure that gives our yards and crops a little pep and vigor. But poop is also one of the many ways plants propagate. Plants need a little help getting their offspring out into the world. They’ve evolved many methods to do that, and providing a nutritional bit of food to a pas...
UT Spring Bee Competition
USDA Photo by Jack Dykinga We have a winner! Katie Elston is the winner of the UT Spring Bee competition. This competition was for submitting the first Travis County mason bee of 2021 to win a copy of the book “The Bees In Your Backyard”! Rationale: One measure of our changing climate is the shifting dates of emergence of our earliest spri...
Kinsey's Wasps
A 1953 issue of TIME magazine had this to say about biologist and sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey: “Kinsey...has done for sex what Columbus did for geography.” Kinsey’s influential work on human sexuality happened at a time in the US when openly discussing, much less researching, what went on in the bedroom was quite shocking. Nonetheless, h...
Meet Stengl-Wyer Fellow: Colin Morrison
The Stengl-Wyer Endowment supports year-long fellowships for doctoral candidates pursuing dissertation research in the area of Diversity of life and organisms in their natural environments. Recipients will receive a 12-month stipend of $34,000, full tuition and fees, staff health insurance, and an allowance of $2,000 to cover research and trav...Discovering New Groundwater Invertebrates in Central Texas
by Freshman Research Initiative students: Nicholas Hartman, Faith Miles, Antonio Rodriguez
amphipod, Stygobromus sp. (Photo: Tom Devitt)
New species of animals evolve through speciation, a process whereby a lineage diverges into a new species. When these new species are first discovered, they are undescribed, meaning they have not be... Brr...It’s Chilly Out There: How Animals Deal With the Cold
Northern Bat (Eptesicus nilssonii), a hibernating bat species. Photo: Magne Flåten, GNU Free Documentation License
Cold weather brings big shifts in nature. In many places, water sources freeze, plants cease blooming and drop their leaves, and the ground is covered in snow. These conditions mean diminished resources for animals, ... Meet Stengl-Wyer Fellow: Angelina Dichiera
Angelina with a red drum. (Sciaenops ocellatus)
The Stengl-Wyer Endowment supports year-long fellowships for doctoral candidates pursuing dissertation research in the area of Diversity of life and organisms in their natural environments. Recipients will receive a 12-month stipend of $34,000, full tuition and fees, staff health insuran... Botany Basics: Understanding Leaves
With fall leaves swirling about, there is no better time to understand some of ways botanists examine leaves to identify the plant from which they come. Certainly not exhaustive, these are just some of the common markers.
VENATION
Venation: The arrangement of veins in a leaf is called the venation pattern. Veins... 
