stem – Reichert Lab

Clearly I don’t update very often, but here is a roundup of our latest lab news:

Grants

We recently received funding from the NSF CAREER program to look at the energetic basis of individual variation in calling behavior in gray treefrogs. This is a very exciting opportunity and will really expand our work on metabolic rate measurement, and will bring in new personnel including students and a postdoc. This grant began April 1, 2024, so stay tuned for updates.

Our NSF funded RaMP post-baccalaureate mentoring program is nearing the end of its first year. We brought in a great cohort of 8 mentees, who worked in different labs on independent projects related to anthropogenic effects on biological processes. The Reichert lab hosted Matthew Thompson, who worked on color polymorphism in grasshoppers and cognition in crickets. We’ll have a new mentee soon, and the program is expanding to 10 total mentees in June.

Our Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation funded project on crawfish frog ecology finished its second year. Grad students Kaleb Banks and Owen Edwards did a huge amount of work to identify new populations, intensively monitor an existing population, and trial new methods to monitor populations with bioacoustics. The students are working hard on publications and we should have some out soon.

Papers

We’ve had several exciting papers in the last few years. I was especially excited by the two in 2024. The first is published in Evolution and represents the first two years of fieldwork at Oklahoma State, and is a project I’ve had in mind for quite some time. It shows repeatability and covariance in call traits in gray treefrogs, and is the basis for our upcoming work on behavioral energetics. The second will be published next week in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. It is a simulation model of a communication network, and is the first simulation I ever attempted so I’m very excited to have it out there. We got some really cool results, including finding that variation in receiver characteristics can drive communication network structure, something I’m looking forward to following up on in the coming years.

Another pretty exciting paper was published last year in collaboration with colleagues Matt Bolek and Liz McCullagh. This was an article in PNAS on parasite effects of receivers of animal communication signals. We really brought together some diverse perspectives on this one and I hope it serves as inspiration for many future studies.

Awards

Kaleb Banks received honorable mention for the NSF GRFP!

Alejandro Marcillo received the Wilhm Outstanding TA award in the Integrative Biology Department

Himidu Pitigala received the Waters Award for research in Aquatic Ecology

Mason Miller successfully defended an honors thesis

Kennedy Funa received the Wentz Fellowship

Kayleen Sugianto received the Niblack Scholarship

Michael Reichert received the Early Career Faculty Award for Scholarly Excellence from the OSU College of Arts & Sciences, and the OSU Excellence in Research Mentoring Award

Other News

Phoebe Will designed an amazing lab logo for us!