News

Arend Hintze reflects on how useful biological concepts, such as evolution, are for engineering problems in an article he wrote for The Conversation. His research uses evolution as an approach to developing artificial intelligence. 

Maris Wright's summer at the Florida Aquarium was an experience that she will never be able to forget. As one of the first interns for the Marine Operations department at the aquarium, she was excited to see what they had planned for me throughout the summer and to really get her feet wet.

Elena Litchman is leading a three-year, $993,000 project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) in collaboration with faculty at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). The project aims to investigate and to predict intraspecific trait variation in phytoplankton. 

Amphibian biologists watched in horror in 2004 as the frogs of El Copé, Panama, began dying by the thousands because of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus more commonly known as chytrid. A new study suggests that, within a decade, the species remaining in El Copé developed the ability to coexist with chytrid fungus. 

Developing cutting-edge statistical tools that can handle these massive new datasets is a piece of the research puzzle, and new research by Gideon Bradburd and colleagues has just added a new tool for the modern genomic toolbox. 

In summer 2018, Zoology major Chelsea Bandy spent a month in Thailand and Australia helping animals and learning hands-on what it’s like to be a veterinarian through the Loop Abroad Program.

At the August MSU Board of Trustee meeting, Ingo Braasch explained what fish can tell us about our evolution, development, and diseases.

With the help of a graduate student, Lauren designed a research study to be conducted in the Pantanal region of Brazil, but she lacked the funds to finance the project. Determined to capture wildlife on camera traps and use this data to define a sustainability plan, she applied for numerous scholarships. She was awarded Integrative Biology's Dr. Marvin Hensley Endowed Scholarship to make her dream a reality.

Under normal conditions, the butterfly needs severe disturbance, such as fire or dense tree removal, to maintain its habitat and food source. The devastating hurricane in southern Florida created a second disturbance. Nick Haddad and Erica Henry have been awarded a grant to study whether these two disturbances create an even better habit and increase butterfly numbers or eliminate butterflies altogether.

Elena Litchman and Christopher Klausmeier are the recipients of a two year, $360,000 NASA Astrobiology/Exobiology grant to fund research on modeling the evolutionary origin of diverse microbial metabolisms.

Thanks to new research published in Ecological Applications, there’s a guide to help land-use development and efforts to conserve amphibians, which are rapidly declining worldwide.

Scientists have found that the evolutionary trick some fish use to make brief electrical discharges could provide new insights on treatments for diseases such as epilepsy. 

Patrick “Pat” Muzzall is a respected parasitologist, working primarily with the parasites of fish and amphibians. Pat was heavily involved in undergraduate education, primarily teaching general biology and parasitology.