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...
Illustration: Nicole Elmer
If someone asks you to imagine Sigmund Freud, what do you see? An older gent with a well-trimmed white beard, cigar in hand? Is he perhaps listening to a patient who talks freely about personal issues while laying on a couch?
This is the Freud most know as the famous neurologist and founder of psychoanalysi...
Fertilizing nitrogen fixing tree seedlings in a greenhouse experiment
Thomas Bytnerowicz is our third Stengl-Wyer Scholar this year. He studies the feedbacks between global change and nitrogen and carbon cycling. As part of the Stengl-Wyer Endowment, the Stengl Wyer Postdoctoral Scholars Program provides up to three years of independent sup...
This perennial shrub (Senegalia wrightii) grows 6-10 feet tall although some accounts say it can grow to triple this size. The lacey foliage is twice pinnately-compound and semi-evergreen. Pinnately-compound refers to a leaf that is divided into smaller leaflets and those leaflets are arranged along each side of the leaf's central stalk, or rachis....
Eurycea latitans embryo (F1) from Honey Creek Cave (Photo: Ruben Tovar)
Central Texas salamanders of the Eurycea clade are enigmatic amphibians that live in dark underground water systems. This sort of habitat has given rise to a number of phenotypes of these salamanders, one of which is the focus of a new National Science Foundation ...
Prairie Warbler (Photo: Charles J. Sharp -CC BY-SA 4.0)
Signs of autumn are all around. The weather is cooling and the days are getting shorter. It’s also a time of migration for some birds. Of Texas’ 615 documented species of birds, about half will migrate. Through the course of the season, millions of birds will pass through the Lone Sta...
Undescribed species from New Braunfels. (Photo: Tom Devitt)
Pale-skinned predators swimming about in dark underground caves sounds like something from a horror film, but they do exist. The reality is probably much less frightening once you know these creatures are groundwater salamanders of the Eurycea genus. Members of David Hillis’ lab i...
Ripe berries on Beautyberry (Photo: Nicole Elmer)
Around this time of year, this shrub is difficult to miss. The normally inconspicuous green berries turn bright purple and become quite popular for wild bird and animal populations. This plant’s scientific name is Callicarpa americana, or better known as the Beautyberry or American Beautybe...
One of the historic Battle Oaks on the UT campus.
Describing a mature live oak as “stately” is a bit of an understatement. They can live several centuries and these older trees command quite a presence. Their trunks can grow 4 feet or more in diameter and their crowns can spread more than 100 feet, sometimes touching the ground in a sprawl...
Habronattus pyrrithrix male (Photo: Ian M. Wright)
Jumping spiders make up the largest family of spiders. Constituting the family Salticidae, this family contains over 600 described genera and over 6000 described species as of 2019. With a family this big, this means jumping spiders show a lot of diversity, and live just about everywh...
Cottonwood trees and willows are similar in many ways. They germinate through wind dispersion and colonize moist muddy areas exposed to full sun. Both are present in Brackenridge Field Lab, and the cottonwoods in particular have a close connection to the history of the field lab.
COTTONWOODS
Cottonwoods (Populus deltoides) are one of the ...
Photo: Tom Devitt
The Cliff Chirping Frog is an elusive creature. Nocturnal and about the size of a quarter, they are more easily heard than seen.
There are actually three species of Chirping Frog in the genus Eleutherodactylus in Central Texas. There is Eleutherodactylus marnockii. They are native and their range is central ...
Today the only member of the family Salmonidae (trout, salmon and their relatives) that occurs in Texas is the non-native Rainbow Trout Oncorhynchus mykiss. That species is widely stocked around the state and there is one permanent population in McKittrick Creek, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, where it was introduced in the early 1900s. However...
Young Dean, reading to go fishing with dad...
Like many others I'm sure, I found that working from home facilitated catching up on housecleaning, etc. Picking away at the long-standing task of re-housing old family photos, I came across one of me heading out trout fishing with my Dad.
It got me reflecting on what a big role ...
Photo: Clinton & Charles Robertson from RAF Lakenheath, UK & San Marcos, TX, USA & UK (Creative Commons)
If the Green Anole is the showy lizard presence in a garden, scampering around while flaring its red dewlap, the Texas Spiny Lizard is the opposite, typically shy, and well-camouflaged agai...
This colorful insect that looks like it’s about to go to a carnival is actually the nymph of Aidemona azteca. The adults of this species are drab in appearance. (Photo: Alex Wild)
Grasshoppers are one of the oldest living group of chewing herbivorous insects, dating back to the early Triassic around 250 million years ago. In Central Texas, we ha...
Photo: ZooFari (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)
Mediterranean gecko? What? But we’re in Texas!
While these are an Old World species, native to Southern Europe and North Africa, Mediterranean geckos have been introduced to many areas of the world, including Texas. They are common around Austin. You’...
Eric Abelson is a Research Scientist in the Department of Integrative Biology. He works closely with the Biodiversity Center.
Tell us where you came from before UT, and what you studied.
After receiving my Ph.D. from Stanford University, where I worked on wildlife behavior and conservation ecology, I went on to two post-doc po...
By Ryan Rash
Rainbow after a light rain with great frigatebirds and boobies flying overhead.
In my previous post, I compared our life in quarantine now to what I experienced on Johnston Atoll, out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where I worked on an invasive species control project through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ...