Saturday, February 1, 2014

Newspaper Feature!

Hello all! It's been a super busy week. I've been working long hours in the genetics lab preparing for my talk on landscape-mediated genetic structure of bobcats in the Texas Panhandle. It's midnight and I just got home from the lab. I had a brief break waiting for my samples to run, so when it came time to go back to campus I snuck up there in my pajamas and enormous, fluffy pink slippers (my mother gave them to me as a joke for Christmas but DEAR GOD they are so comfortable. I'm not ashamed). I was feeling pretty good about the 200 some reactions I'd run today that I slid down the hall Risky Business style... luckily no one saw me.

Today has been a good day even though 18 of those 200 reactions didn't analyze correctly (Celine Dion's song "My Heart Will Go On" came on the radio as I read the 18 failed reactions and I had a good laugh as a result. Sometimes science doesn't work). I received the link to tomorrow's newspaper feature on my thesis research. A local hunting organization volunteered to interview me on my research at West Texas A&M to solicit participation from local hunters. I rely a lot on hunter willingness to donate tissue samples from harvested animals, and together we can learn new things about wildlife populations and hopefully  contribute a piece of the puzzle for effective management and conservation.

To read the fantastic article, click here: Important Work

A big thanks to Fat Boy Outdoors for being willing to interview me on my research!



Anesthetized gray fox in Palo Duro Canyon State Park. Citizen contribution enables me to understand how the landscape structures gene flow in gray foxes, coyotes, and bobcats.