Another year, another conference!

[Dmmetler]

We're mid-way through the Tennessee Herpetological conference. It's obvious that DD is in her element. Yesterday was the student talks, and she presented about halfway through. She was much more relaxed, and was actually able to listen to other talks before hers came up (last year she was so nervous that I don't think she heard anything until after her talk was over. We also got to tour the turtle/tortoise SSP work at Zoo Knoxville, and visit the Vet school at UT (DD definitely was treated as a tag-along then, which led to some comments from grad students after the fact, because, as one put it "I'm a lot less likely to give up a year from a PhD to go to vet school than she is!" DD also was able to connect with SE Missouri State, which has a field station relatively close to us (as in, a few hours away).,

 

DD, as usual, loved the auction-her big "win" was a stuffed red cheeked salamander.

 

Today is professional talks and out into the Smokies. Saturday, we plan to visit UT's bio department (although the grad student who is going to give us a tour warned us that campus will be dead. Football is a big deal at UT-but the chance to go into the Smokies with herpetologists outweighs getting to see campus with students on it).

[Dmmetler]

Today we had talks in the morning and a field trip into the smokies in the afternoon to look for plethodontid salamanders. DD managed to herp a P. jordani (red cheeked salamander). It is considered a species of greatest concern in TN because of it's small range (basically only the Great Smokies National Park). I'm tired :).

[Dmmetler]

We visited the UT EEB department (and walked through a few others, like Math and computer science/electrical engineering (which was fun-they were midway through a 48 hour hack-a-thon)). UT does a lot of work with mountain species (not surprising, given their proximity to the Smokies) especially salamanders (on the herp side), although one of the labs DD found the most interesting was focused on spiders. They also have a huge plant bio department. It seems like a very grad focused school-almost like undergrads are an afterthought. Of course, that could have been because we were talking about research. The folks we talked to really didn't know much about undergraduate research beyopd "a lot of our students do REU's and get into good grad schools".

[CanadianAlison+3boys]

That sounds like an amazing time!!!

 

I know nothing about herpetology but following along your posts about it is really interesting :)

[Black-eyed Suzan]

Fun! We recently finished the book Park Scientists that talked about the red-cheeked salamanders in Great Smokies National Park.

 

Thanks for sharing your adventures! :)

[Dmmetler]

If anyone wants to see it, here is DD's talk-not the best video quality, but not too bad.

 

https://youtu.be/-hxzbV8qv7w

 

 

[daijobu]

Today we had talks in the morning and a field trip into the smokies in the afternoon to look for plethodontid salamanders. DD managed to herp a P. jordani (red cheeked salamander). It is considered a species of greatest concern in TN because of it's small range (basically only the Great Smokies National Park). I'm tired :).

 

I'm going to guess without looking on Wikipedia.  Do they have lots of ("pletho") teeth ("dontid")?  

[quark]

If anyone wants to see it, here is DD's talk-not the best video quality, but not too bad.

 

I couldn't hear her very clearly but she sounds very calm and confident! :hurray:

 

[Dmmetler]

yes, many teeth :). They're lungless, land dwelling salamanders, mostly quite small, and relatively cryptic.