There have been lots of good accomplishments and changes in the lab, so here’s a quick summary.

Graduations and new lab members

Phoebe Will successfully defended her masters thesis! This was the first work out of the lab on metabolic rate and its effects on calling, which will be a big focus in the next several years. On that note, we welcome in two new lab members for January 2025: Rachel Jacks is a new PhD student and Matías Muñoz will be the first postdoc in the lab!

Our NSF funded RaMP post-baccalaureate mentoring program is recruiting for year 3. Meanwhile, Brenden Dehner has been doing great work as the lab’s mentee for year 2. He collected a very nice dataset on the effects of autotomy on movement in grasshoppers, and looked at some of the factors that cause variation in autotomy speed. We are working on publishing that one and meanwhile he gave a great talk at SICB in Atlanta.

Papers

We had a few more papers come out in the second part of 2024. First, PhD student Kaleb Banks got his first paper from his work on the crawfish frog project, looking at how habitat affects sound propagation of crawfish frog calls. It was recently published in Bioacoustics. We were also involved in a big collaborative effort to discuss the state of amphibian genomics research as part of the Amphibian Genomics Consortium, recently published in BMC Genomics. Our research is starting to head in that direction so it was a good opportunity to discuss the challenges in the field. We’ve got a few papers coming out soon in Animal Behaviour from past work on insects and birds so stay tuned!

Other good news

Undergrad Kennedy Funa has been hard at work as a Wentz Fellow, looking at effects of experience in aggressive contests on future behavior in crickets.

The lab was well represented at SICB. Michael presented MS student Phoebe Will’s work on resting metabolic rate and calling in gray treefrogs. Alejandro Marcillo and Jain PK both gave talks on the fist chapter of their PhD. And lab alum Elena Liebl gave a poster on some of our cricket aggression work. Michael also attended the Animal Behavior Society Conference in Ontario in the summer and presented on our communication network simulation work.

Our crawfish frog project received a 2-year funding extension from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, which will fund Kaleb Banks for a few more years to continue our exciting work on that species in Oklahoma. We have several papers on crawfish frogs in the works.

Michael won the 2024 Distinguished Early Career Faculty Award from Oklahoma State University.

Above, Alejandro, Jain, Elena, and the current Reichert lab in action at SICB 2025 in Atlanta.