In a cross-town collaboration with Dr. Andrew Eckert’s lab at VCU, we are pleased to present to you a paper on the the evolutionary genomics of an insect invasion along a latitudinal gradient in North America!
Category: VCU
Kristine, Lily, and our VCU undergraduate colleagues Hannah ’18 & Madison ’17 represented the Grayson Lab in Portland, Oregon at the 102nd annual Ecological Society of America Meeting. Hannah & Madison presented our results from the stage-specific heat shock experiment on August 7th (UR Undergraduate coauthors: Nana Banahene ’18 & Salem Salem ’18). Lily presented a talk on our
Madison, Hannah, Kristine, & Lily at ESA 2017 in Portland, OR
research with the red backed salamanders in the James River Park on August 8th (UR Undergraduate coauthors: Sarah Timko ’17 & Christian Law ’17). Kristine wrapped things up with a talk on the Allee slope and Slow-the-Spread gypsy moth management program on August 10th. It was a great meeting! (And concurrent with the 38th annual Footbag Championships!)
We did it! In a collaboration with Salvatore Agosta at VCU and Dylan Parry at SUNY-ESF, we received and Early Career NSF Grant!! The grant, titled: Linking thermal tolerance to invasion dynamics: Climate and physiological capacity as regulators of geographical spread, will help fund projects relating to the physiological tolerance and fitness of gypsy moth populations at the invasion front in North America.
Find some the news releases here: NSF News Release from UR and here: NSF News Release
Sal Agosta, Carolyn May, Noah Hillerbrand, Eloy Martinez, and Kristine Grayson at VCU learning about the “thermal hut.”
We have just begun a collaboration with Salvatore Agosta (VCU) and Eloy Martinez (Guánica State Forest, Puerto Rico) to study the metabolism of gypsy moths from different populations reared at different acclimation temperatures. This past weekend UR students, Carolyn May and Noah Hillerbrand, along with Trevor Faske (VCU), Lily Thompson, and Kristine met up with Eloy & Sal at VCU to learn about the respirometry equipment and test out the machine for research in March and April. Thanks for coming all the way from Puerto Rico to help us out Eloy!
After much revision and hard work, Lily’s Master’s Thesis is finally published in Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata! You can find a PDF of the article here.
Have you ever wondered if gypsy moth larvae do better when reared on artificial diet or on leaves? So did we! And now our research on it is published in Environmental Entomology! Click on the title below for the PDF!
Performance of Wild and Laboratory-Reared Gypsy Moth (Lepidoptera: Erebidae): A Comparison between Foliage and Artificial Diet
Kristine L. Grayson; Dylan Parry; Trevor M. Faske; Audrey Hamilton; Patrick C. Tobin; Salvatore J. Agosta; Derek M. Johnson
Environmental Entomology 2015;
doi: 10.1093/ee/nvv063
