Biodiversity Blog
A Lizard in Winter
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...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... 
Shrubs of BFL: Texas lantana
Photos: Larry Gilbert This ubiquitous native low shrub is hard to miss. Part of the verbena family, those red, orange, and yellow blooms appear when the weather in Central Texas becomes close to unbearable. The scientific name is Lantanta urticoides, however it often gets confused with Lantana horrida, the name inspired by its strong odor...
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... 
Saving the Guadalupe fescue
Guadalupe fescue. (Photo: Carolyn Whiting) West Texas is known for arid landscapes reminiscent of old Western movies rather than cool damp mountains 6000 feet in altitude. But this is what areas of the Chisos Mountains are like, and where UT researchers have been surveying a rare grass, the Guadalupe fescue (Festuca ligulata). While once s...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... 
Mowing with Purpose: Managing Invasive Grasses at BFL
by Jason Lawson, Field Station Research Engineering/Scientist Associate Susie’s Meadow: a favorite landmark at BFL and one of the areas currently undergoing treatment for invasive grasses. The bucolic image of undulating grass fields in a summer breeze looks and feels uniquely Texan. It seems almost unbelievable that so many grasses t...The Power of Switchgrass: a Chat with Tom Juenger
Drought experiments with switchgrass using the rainout shelters in the Experimental Garden at BFL.
As a field station near the heart of Austin, Brackenridge Field Lab hosts important research by many UT faculty. Amongst them is Dr. Tom Juenger in the Department of Integrative Biology. He studies ecological and evolutionary genetics of local adap... 
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...
Linda Escobar 2021 Award Recipients Announced
The Linda Escobar Award was established by family and friends to honor the memory of the late Linda Katherine Albert de Escobar (1940–1993), a botanist, educator, and alumna of the UT Plant Biology program whose research centered on the systematics of the genus Passiflora, the widespread and taxonomically diverse plant genus that includes the culti...
Influential People of Biodiversity: Billie Turner
Posing in 1970 with Perityle turneri (Asteraceae), one of many species named in Turner's honor. (Photo: Mike Powell) I first met Billie Turner in early 2016. That was when I’d started working on the Integrative Biology History project, and as Turner had a seven-decade career, I knew I had to interview him. With so much to cover, one meeting woul...
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.
Featured Species: Clown Beetle
Clown beetles, also known as Hister beetles, are a family (Histeridae) that contains over 3900 species. Their unusually glossy-but-sculptured surfaces and spiny appendages make them sought after by some collectors. They are found throughout the world, but not terribly common in Central Texas, which is why when Dr. Alex Wild, Curator ...
