First up, some awards:

• Majo has been awarded the Philomathia Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Sciences! This is a prestigious fellowship for UC Berkeley graduate students, "Students are nominated to receive the award on the basis of their high level of academic distinction and exceptional promise." https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/philomathiacenter/graduate-student-fellowship-environmental-sciences

• Becca was elected as a councilor for the Society of Systematic Biologists. Her term starts in January 2025.

Conference updates

• Becca, Kannon, and Natalie attended SSAR 2024. Kannon gave a fabulous rendition of his Turnin’ the frickin’ frogs gay talk. Natalie presented a poster on her senior research project. Becca presented on a paper currently in review about passive accumulation of alkaloids in non-toxic poison frogs.

• Becca, Kannon, Valeria, and Majo are heading to WCH 10 in Malaysia in 2 weeks.

Personnel updates

• Sophie Draper started as our new lab technician. Sophie just graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota. She has experience with snail husbandry, fieldwork in Africa, people / project management, and research in genomics.

• Nuzha Baksh said goodbye as she heads to Athens, Georgia to start a PhD.

• We got two pet frogs for the lab (Dendrobates tinctorius). They were named Denny’s and IHOP after some disagreements about restaurant preferences arising from Kannon’s after-fieldwork dinners.

• Adri Jeckel started in July as a new postdoc. She will be working on the toxic flies and poison frog projects.

Fieldwork

• Becca went to Ecuador in May to gather samples for the NSF project on color in poison frogs, in collaboration with Santiago Ron. The field season was productive but the samples are still in Ecuador because airlines refuse to carry on the dry shipper. She also visited collaborators at USFQ including Juan Manuel Guaysamín who will be working this fall with Majo trying to cultivate tetrodotoxin-producing bacteria from Atelopus.

• Majo traveled to Colombia for her final field season of the PhD to collect samples of a few species of Harlequin toads that live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Working with Beto Rueda and his team she was able to obtain even more samples and species that she had hoped for.

We had three stellar undergraduates finish their degrees this May: Ines Huret, Vashee Shenthan, and Natalie Meyer. Ines and Natalie both completed theses and Ines won an award in Natural History from the IB department. Peter Zhiyang Chen also walked this semester, although he will finish in Fall 2024. He was awarded the Franklin Henry Award, which celebrates achievement in physiology, cognition, and biodynamics. Ines will start a two-year lab technician position in the Pellman Lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in June 2024. Natalie will be a research assistant at the Stoller Lab at UCSF during summer 2024, and then a research assistant at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus starting fall 2024. Vashee is planning to pursue a degree in medicine and is currently (May 2024) waiting to hear which medical school he will attend. Peter is taking a few more classes this fall while he applies to graduate school and looks for lab technician jobs for 2025.

Ines Huret

Natalie Meyer

Vashee Shenthan

Peter Zhiyang Chen

We also have bittersweet news that Nikki Lemus, who has been working as a part-time technician in the lab since 2021, will be moving on to greener pastures. To be specific, they were awarded an NSF GRFP and will start graduate school at the University of Kansas in fall 2024! Go Nikki!

Nikki Lemus

Congratulations to Valeria! The WWF EFN program will support her during her final years of the doctorate program at UC Berkeley.

Valeria Ramírez Castañeda in Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia. Photo by Darío Alarcón

An excerpt from Valeria’s application:

Research and conservation of neotropical snakes is not only relevant but also urgent and timely in the face of the rapid deforestation rate of the Amazon rainforest in the last decade. The city of Leticia, located in the center of the Amazon rainforest, has 50,000 inhabitants of diverse origins who interact in different ways with nature, yet all of them encounter snakes in their daily lives. More than 30 species of snakes are commonly found in this city but at least a hundred live in the Central Amazon basin region, including at least three endemic species. However, it is estimated that millions of snakes are killed daily in Colombia, the main reasons being deforestation and intentional mortality by humans. Therefore, the urbanization processes in the Amazon and the city’s inhabitants are key players in the future of the rainforest. 

Snakes are secondary predators and accomplish a key role in the ecosystem as frog, lizard, and small mammal consumers. Thus, studying snake interactions is fundamental to determining trophic networks in the rainforest. My main interest is to understand how reciprocal interaction between species can maintain and produce biodiversity in the tropics. Coevolution has traditionally been based on non-tropical models. For example, in my research topic, one of the best-known predator-prey models is the interaction between Californian garter snakes and their toxic newt prey. Although this model has revealed how resistance against a single toxin in a one-to-one species interaction arises, diversity in the tropics imposes new challenges. In the Colombian Amazon, more than 50 species of snakes species are feeding on frogs that secrete toxin cocktails. Thus, it is necessary to investigate tropical systems to understand coevolution in complex scenarios.

It’s grant season…

• Valeria was awarded a Tinker Field Research Grant from the Center for Latin America Studies at UC Berkeley

• Valeria, Majo, and Tyler each received funding from the MVZ for summer research

• Kannon Pearson was recognized by the Rausser College Dean’s Office of Instruction and Student Affairs Award Committee with the Kenneth L. Babcock Prize in Environmental Science for his outstanding research and outreach efforts. Kannon will be joining us as a new graduate student in the fall.

• TBD was awarded an NSF PRFB and will be joining the lab in the fall. More information soon!

• Sofia Beskind, currently an undergraduate researcher in the Matz Lab at UT Austin, will be joining us this summer to do research on Epipedobates, funded by an NSF REU grant that she received. Congrats Sofia!

NSF GRFP awards were announced this week & Tyler was recognized with an Honorable Mention. Congrats Tyler!!

Also this week, Valeria was recognized for her dedication to teaching with a prestigious Outstanding GSI Award. Congrats Valeria and thanks for your hard work!