This is a mermithid found in an Asian Hornet. (Wikicommons photo: PeerJ, 2015)
In the spirit of Halloween and all that is spooky, we are doing a series of short blogs on parasitism!
In biology, parasitism at its most basic level is where one species benefits at the expense of its host. The parasite does not always kill its host, but when it does...
With the weather finally cooling, I think about the upcoming winter. Usually, it’s the most beloved Austin season for me as I can go outside comfortably without the aid of mosquito repellent, for about a month anyway.
This year however, I wonder about the next season with some trepidation. Most of us here in Austin right now remember winter storm U...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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, full t...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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, ...
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...