JOURNAL CLUB
Spring 2018
Journal Club meets every Friday at 4 pm at O’Bannon’s in Northgate.
… Friday, May 4. Megan Exnicios will present an article about homosexual behavior in insects. This is probably her last time presenting so expect something special! [Elsevier/Animal Behaviour]
… Friday, April 27. No journal club
… Friday, April 20. Instead of our usual club meeting at O’Bannons, we should attend this:
Texas Sea Grant is organizing a public screening of the documentary film STRAWS followed by a panel discussion on April 20th @ 4pm in Rudder Theater.
In 2015, Texas A&M University graduate student Christine Figgener found a sea turtle in the wild with a straw in its nose. She filmed the straw removal, posted her video on YouTube and it went viral. This video helped propel a worldwide movement to reduce the use of straws and other unnecessary single-use plastics. This movement is documented in the film STRAWS.
As part of our Earth Day celebration at TAMU on April 20, 2018, from 4-5:30 pm, we are showing the film in Rudder Theater to the TAMU community. The film is only 30 minutes long. Immediately following the film a panel of students and local celebrities including Christine Figgener, one of the STRAWS film stars, will discuss straws and other single-use plastics, their impacts on wildlife, the environment and human health and solutions for reducing ocean plastic.
… Friday, April 13. Gaston Jofre will be leading the discussion about the origin of tetrapods. See you this Friday at O’Bannon’s at 4pm. [Origin of tetrapods] Also, this video.
… Friday, April 6. NO JOURNAL CLUB TODAY because of EIS.
… Friday, March 30. Daniel Powell will be leading the discussion. We’ll be talking about avian predation on annual fish and how it affects their survival depending on their size and sex. Interesting experiment! [Reichard et al 2018]
… Friday, March 23. Luke Bower will be leading the discussion of an article that compares face and brain evolution in two groups with high craniofacial variability. See you at O’Bannon’s this Friday! [Evans et al 2017]
… Friday, March 16. No Journal Club. Spring Break
… Friday, March 9 David Saenz will enlighten us about knife fish and their fascinating communication methods. Apparently geographical variation in their electric signal is being ruled by drift rather than some other source of selection. See you at O’Bannon’s. [Picq et al 2016]
… Friday, March 2 Stephen Bovio will be leading the discussion on reinforcement, geographic variation and hybridization in frogs. [Lemmon and Juenger 2017]
… Friday, February 23 Gaston Ignacio Jofre will be lead the discussion about how biased learning can affect mate choice in a butterfly. See you at O’Bannon’s at 4pm. [Westerman et al 2012]
… Friday, February 16 – no journal club
… Friday, February 9 – no journal club, Darwin Day!
… Friday, February 2 we will be talking about how pollinators use smell to locate flowers and how environmental odors affect the pollinator’s olfactory ability. Alyson Brokaw will lead. See you at O’Bannon’s at 4! [Riffell et al 2014]
… Don’t miss this semester’s first meeting of Journal Club on Friday, January 26, 2018. We’ll be discussing two papers: one on sexual attraction in mosses (Ortiz-Ramirez et al. 2017); the other, a comment by Steinhorst and Kudla.
… Tentative date for first EEBISO meeting is this Friday, January 19. There are some EEBISO agenda items besides from journal club that we should discuss sooner rather than later — particularly Darwin Day and fundraising/planning for crawfish boil.
Fall 2017
Journal Club meets every Friday at 4 pm at O’Bannon’s in Northgate to discuss the wonders of science.
… Friday, December 8. Sadly, we are approaching our last Journal Club of the year. Last week’s leaderless dynamic worked really nice so we are going to repeat it again this Friday when we explore the story of Brownian walk. Grab the article and meet us at O’Bannon’s 4 pm.
… Friday, December 1, there’s no leader or paper to discuss. We’ll be talking about indigenous knowledge, science education and the role of culture in science. It should be an interesting discussion! See you at O’Bannon’s at 4 pm.
… Friday, November 24 – no journal club
… Friday, November 17, Mateo Garcia will be leading a discussion about free mate choice in humans. [Sorokowski et al 2017]
… Friday, November 10, we are going to be discussing poison frogs and poison resistance. Come to our dear EEB Journal Club and learn about the evolution and functionality of poison frog resistance to their own poison. David Saenz will walk us through any questions we may have. [Tarvin et al 2017]
… Friday, November 3, Luke Bower will be leading the discussion on an article about “Trophic divergence despite morphological convergence” between snakes from Australia and North America. Should be interesting! See you at O’Bannon’s at 4pm! [Grundler & Rabosky 2014]
… Friday, October 27, our own EEB student organization president Alyson Brokaw will be leading a discussion about bat-pitcher plant mutualism. Happy Bat Week! See you all this Friday at O’Bannon’s at 4pm. Feel free to extend the invitation to other students. [Schoner et al 2017]
… Friday, October 20, we’ll be reading about invertebrate invasions. The deep thinker and meticulous Zachary Hancock will be leading the discussion. See you at O’Bannon’s at 4:00. Bring your jackets because the weather is finally cooling down. [Reise et al 2017]
… Friday, October 13, new EEB student Amanda Beckman will be guiding us in this week’s journal club. Please read this article about the importance of social bonds in baboons and let’s make Amanda’s debut a wonderful, enlightening and fruitful discussion. [McFarland et al 2017]
… Friday, October 6, Gaston Jofre will be leading us through a promising comparative genomic discussion between humans and honey bees, that can possibly help us understand the conservation of autism-related genes. Super interesting! Join us. [Shpliger et al 2017]
… Friday, Sept 22 we’ll be discussing an interesting article about the behavioral mechanisms involved in hybridizing flies. Daniel Powell we’ll be leading the discussion. [Giesen et al 2017]
… Friday, Sept 15th we’ll be talking about sperm storage in guppies. Our sperm expert R.S. Bovio will be leading the discussion. Please extend this invitation to other student/staff/faculty who might be interested in EEB. [Devigili et al 2016]
Spring 2017
… No journal club this Friday, April 28
… This Friday April 21 we are going to be discussing “A mechanism of extreme growth and reliable signaling in sexually selected ornaments and weapons” by Emlen et al 2012 that made it all the way to Science Magazine. David Saenz is going to lead the discussion. [PDF]
… Friday April 7, Zach is going to walk us through how humans recreational use of beaches can be disadvantageous to the threatened hooded plovers. Schlacher et al analyze the negative effects of trampling. [PDF]
… This Friday, March 31st at 4 pm, we’ll be widening our knowledge on how the field of animal personality provides new insights to behavioral ecology. Our very own president Alyson will be leading the discussion.
… Due to the annual Ecological Integration Symposium, there will be no journal club on Friday, March 24.
… No Journal Clubs on March 10 and March 17 due to Spring Break
… Please join us Friday March 3 at 4 pm at O’Bannon’s to discuss a brand new article from about genetic structure of social birds. Stephen Bovio will be leading the discussion. [Morinha et al.]
… Please join us at O’Bannon’s at 4 on Friday, 2/24/17 for our fifth EEB Journal Club meeting of the semester. We will be discussing an article about multimodel courtship in peacock spiders from our next (2/27) EEB seminar speaker Damian Elias. Mateo Garcia will be leading the discussion. [PDF, Girard et al 2015]
… Join us at O’Bannon’s at 4 on Friday, Feb 17, 2017 for our fourth EEB Journal Club meeting of the semester. Janelle Goeke will be leading the discussion of “Saving two birds with one stone: solving the quandary of introduced, threatened species” by Gibson and Yong. [PDF]
… Please join us at O’Bannon’s at 4 pm on Friday, 2/10/17 for our third EEB Journal Club meeting of the semester. We will be discussing “Species interactions constrain geographic range expansion over evolutionary time.” [Abstract]
… Please join us at O’Bannon’s at 4 on Friday, 2/3/17 for the second EEB Journal Club meeting of the semester. We will be discussing “Divergent natural selection promotes immigrant inviability at early and late stages of evolutionary divergence” (Authors Ingley and Johnson) [Wiley Online]
If you would like to lead next week’s discussion, please bring two or three abstracts to the meeting for the group to choose from.
