Biodiversity Blog
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...From the Jha Lab: Using Pollen to Solve Crime
A carpenter bee.
Crime scenes are often the stuff of fascination for many, ripe for the various outputs of fiction. What might be somewhat less glamorous than many TV shows would suggest are some of the crime-solving tools available to forensic investigators. Enter forensic botany and palynology. Forensic botany is the science that connect... History of UT Entomology, Part 5: Sword's Grasshoppers
Schistocerca lineata
In our last blog on the History of UT Entomology, we looked at the damage screwworm flies were causing to livestock until the Sterile Insect Technique was introduced. In this blog, we will be looking at another infamous insect responsible for massive damage to resources such as crops. We begin with some of the... 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... History of UT Entomology, Part 4: Screwworms
Photo: Judy Gallagher (lCreative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
Few people want to be a screwworm fly (Cochliomyia hominivorax) for Halloween, but maybe this should be a valid costume choice as what they do is pretty horrifying. In the early to mid-20th century, this obligate parasite, often called just “screwworm” for ... 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... 
Sigmund and His Eels
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...
Meet Stengl-Wyer Scholar: Tom Bytnerowicz
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...
History of UT Entomology, Part 3: "Oz’s" Mosquitoes and Beetles
Photo: Christine Gilbert As explored in Part 2 of our series, the Drosophila group at UT was still active in the late 1930s, researching genetics through the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as well as Drosophila diversity. But there were other entomologists at UT using different insects for their work around the same time. One was Dr. Osmund...
Shrubs of BFL: Catclaw Acacia
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....
Meet Stengl-Wyer Scholar: Shana Caro
Shana holding a superb starling (Lamprotornis superbus) As part of the new Stengl-Wyer Endowment, the Stengl Wyer Postdoctoral Scholars Program provides up to three years of independent support for talented postdoctoral researchers in the broad area of the diversity of life and/or organisms in their natural environments. Shana Caro is one o...
History of UT Entomology, Part 2: The Fly Years
John T. Patterson. “Sandy-haired and short of stature, he had a ready wit, a love of repartee, and the ebullient temperament we traditionally associate with the Irish people.” - Theophilus Painter in a 1965 memoir about him Part 1 explored the formative years for UT entomology and the focus on ants, with William Morton Wheeler and his stu...
Members of Hillis Lab Receive NSF Grant
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 ...
Fall Migration of Birds, Texas and Beyond
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...
BFL to the Rescue: Helping Instructors Teach During a Pandemic
All lined up and ready to learn. (Photo: Larry Gilbert) It’s a hot late August afternoon. Classes have started for UT students, but this year things look a little different. Fifteen minutes from campus, at Brackenridge Field Lab (BFL), ecology students stand ready, six feet apart, notebooks in hand, masks covering their mouths and noses. D...
IB Researchers to Lead Three-Year Groundwater Salamander Survey
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...
History of UT Entomology, Part 1: It Begins with Ants
From Ants: Their Structure, Development, and Behavior (1910) When UT opened its doors in 1883, biology was not part of the curriculum, despite that faculty at the time pushed for representation of botany and physiology. “The new State University organized in 1883 had more ambitions than resources,” wrote Geneticist and UT professor Clarenc...
