Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Congratulations, Dr. Emily Basile!

As you can probably guess from the title of this post, Emily Basile received her Ph.D. today! At 1PM this afternoon, she presented her dissertation, "Persistent Organic Pollutants in Diamondback Terrapin Tissues, Eggs, and Sediments in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey", to the public. Around 2PM, Emily defended her dissertation to her committee. Then at 3PM, Dr. Emily joined the Avery lab, the ecology lab, and the Department of Biology at a party in her honor.

Next week, John Wnek will be defending his dissertation and hopefully earning the title of "Dr.". Don't worry ... I'll keep you updated on his progress!

In other news, Jules, Abby, and I are all in the process of getting ready for field season. Jules has been keeping herself busy trying to determine how she can walk two different beaches for eight hours a day watching for nesting terrapins (hmm ... sounds like she may need some help from Earthwatch volunteers). Abby just got a spectrophotometer so that she can analyze the different color wavelengths of the terrapins for her morphology study this summer. And I have my fingers crossed that this will be my last field season. I still need to expose a whole bunch of terrapins (53 to be exact) to boat engine sounds and I need to make some ambient sound recordings in the bay.

We're going to start unpacking the camp on June 7 and then the first Earthwatch team will join us on June 13. Bring it on, field season ... we're ready to catch some terrapins!

Monday, May 10, 2010

Jules Winters, PhD Candidate

When a student is working towards a PhD, there's one moment that tends to evoke more fear than any other ... the candidacy exam. The candidacy exam at Drexel consists of two parts: a week long written exam and a 3-4 hour oral exam. During the oral exam, the student needs to defend the answers to their written exam and also present/defend their dissertation proposal. Typically, a PhD student attempts to complete their candidacy exam at the end of their second year of study. In exciting news, Jules just passed her candidacy exam on May 5. Since it was also Cinco de Mayo, a bunch of us ecology nerds went out to celebrate Jules' achievement following her exam.

From left to right: Pat (frogs in Bioko Island), Samir (loggerhead sea turtles in Greece), Jen (Samir's fiancee), Jules (PhD Candidate extraordinaire), Me, Steve (freshwater turtles in southeastern PA), Maggie (red colobus in Bioko Island), and Jack (loggerhead sea turtles in Greece).

As far as what this means for the terrapin project in Barnegat Bay, this summer Jules will start collecting "real" data, i.e., the data that she will eventually use to write her dissertation. My understanding is that she'll be looking at terrapin nesting in response to anthropogenic (human-caused) changes in the bay such as bulkheading.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Gulf Coast Oil Spill Threatens Terrapins

By now, everyone has probably heard about the oil spill that occurred off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010. My understanding is that there was an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig which resulted in a massive oil spill. Yesterday, the estimate was that the spill covers a surface area of more than 2,500 square miles. Oil is leaking from the oil well at the rate of 5 to 25 thousand barrels per day. By April 30, the oil had already begun to appear at wildlife refuges on Louisiana's coast. Many species are at risk including shrimp, fish, marine mammals, shore birds, and unfortunately ... even terrapins.

For more information on the oil spill and gulf coast terrapins, check out this link!

Oil Spill Threatens Terrapins

Monday, May 3, 2010

Congratulations Dr. Claire!!!


I'm proud to announce that Claire Sheridan (Coleman) successfully defended her dissertation on April 8, 2010. Congrats, Dr. Claire! Since Dr. Avery's graduate students are rarely all in the same location at the same time, we took the opportunity to pose for a lab photo (From left: John, Abby, Steven, Me, Emily, Jules, Dr. Claire, and Dr. Avery).