Career Opportunities

Good online resources for jobs/graduate programs in biology, ecology, natural resources, conservation, botany...

http://www.wfsc.tamu.edu/jobboard/

http://www.conbio.org/jobs/

http://www.nku.edu/~boycer/gradopps.html

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/UndergradInternships/

Link for Carolina Tiger Rescue "Bring Them Home" Campaign

Carolina Tiger plans to rescue 3 lions: Tarzan, Sheba, and Sebastian, and 3 tigers: Titan, Bali, and Java from the Wild Animal Orphanage in San Antonio, TX. The facility began moving towards closing at the end of August. Some of the new animals should be arriving at Karen's Keep (quarantine) by the end of the week.

Carolina Tiger needs to raise $7,500 to cover the cost of the animals' transport and initial medical care. Donate to our rescue campaign and help us "Bring Them Home"! funds raised in addition to $7500 will be put towards future rescues.

Please visit the website and consider a charitable donation for these animals.

http://carolinatigerrescue.org/news/2010/2010-11-06_WAORescue.asp

Visit the facebook page to get a look at these six cats!
http://www.facebook.com/index.php?lh=441fd662b1e57dec8cde6d775d66cf2f&#!/CarolinaTigerRescue

Carolina Tiger Rescue Holiday Update

For those of you who don't know, Carolina Tiger Rescue is my 'home territory,' the place that first introduced me to and helped me learn about so many exotic cat species. The people and the animals at this sanctuary are so amazing! I love each and every creature- two legged and four. The sanctuary is home to tigers, ocelots, caracals, servals, one bobcat, kinkajous, and binturongs. For those close by, now is a great time to consider becoming a member, volunteer, or adoptive parent at Carolina Tiger! The sanctuary will be receiving six new cats in the next few weeks: three lions and three tigers from a closing facility in Texas. With these new additions, help is always needed to continue ensuring the high quality of life maintained at Carolina Tiger Rescue. Also, with the holidays approaching, the priority item on their wish list are Motorola radios for animal care and safety coordination. Having dropped one of these radios into a five gallon bucket of water (oops), I know how heavily they are used and how essential they are to getting things done on the 55 acre facility. The sanctuary always welcomes new volunteers, so please visit their website to learn about new volunteer orientations. Adoptive parents donate a fixed rate in honor of the of the resident animals, thereby becoming the animal's "adoptive parent." Adoptive parents enjoy visits, enrichment creation, and playing active roles in the care of those animals. And finally, if you are looking for a way to give during the holidays, consider a charitable donation for the animals at Carolina Tiger Rescue. This might be cliche, but they really are some cool cats!

And if you aren't nearby or cannot afford the time to visit Carolina Tiger Rescue, visit the website to learn about how shopping Pampered Chef with give a portion of the proceeds to Carolina Tiger Rescue (good through December 6).

http://carolinatigerrescue.org/


Be sure to become a fan on facebook!
http://www.facebook.com/index.php?lh=441fd662b1e57dec8cde6d775d66cf2f&#!/CarolinaTigerRescue

 

Julio, one of my favorite ocelots, with his holiday pumpkin (October 2009)

Rat, But Not the Rodent

The project I'm working on has been a long time coming; clouded leopards have very unique reproductive problems, unfortunately which cannot be fixed with the snap of a finger (were this the case, I'm pretty sure I'd be famous right now). I'm working on the female side of things, but there is also a male aggression study going on that a new intern just arrived for. I'm working for a pretty cool lady named JoGayle Howard. JoGayle is quite literally the clouded leopard queen: she's headed up most of the studies and the advances in clouded reproduction. She's a theriogenologist, or a veterinarian who focuses on reproduction, and a PhD at the Smithsonian. She's done everything, from developing successful cryopreservation of sperm, laparoscopic artificial insemination in carnivores, and genome banking. In short, she's pretty awesome. Which by default, the project I'm working under, under the supervision of postdoc Rebecca Hobbs, is also awesome. For more insight into the project, check out this website:

http://cloudedleopard.org/default.aspx?link=research_inzoos

Having been here in Front Royal for a month, I've finally gotten into the swing of things with the project. I've cataloged, dried, and sorted more fecal samples than I care to know, and developed a system for which to extract each sample set. I'm using a boiling extraction process, which is pretty simple: fecal sample are collected from each animal over a pre-determined time period (one sample, or one week's worth, is not enough to quantify hormone changes in reaction to the study protocol); freeze-dried of all water (called lyophilization); and crushed and weighed out into test tubes. Once in the tubes, I add radioactivity that will later determine the extraction efficiency of each sample; that is, the radioactivity provides a way to show how much hormone was pulled from the fecal sample during the extraction process. This is essential because later steps will be measuring hormone levels, such as estrogen and progestogen. The extraction of this whole process takes place with the addition of ethanol and boiling the mixture for twenty minutes (smells great), then centrifuging (think worst merry-go-round ride ever), then centrifuging some more with some more ethanol, and drying down the supernatant two different times. There are more in-between steps, with some methanol and dilution buffer and a sonicator, the machine that cleans jewelry, but these are the basics. After I have my final dilution, called a cocktail (no joke!), I throw all the samples into a beta counter, a machine which measures the radiation emitted by beta-emitting nucleotides via light pulses (the scintillation fluid I add to the cocktail throws a nice prism ). In short, I find out if I did the whole process right and have proper extraction efficiencies for my samples. Usually, I do. I've got to re-run about twenty samples, and so far I've run almost 600. Once I'm done extracting all these samples, I'll hopefully have time left during the internship to run enzyme immunoassay plates (EIA) for the hormones. I'm looking forward to more procedures under the guidance of the lab manager and the dugong project being run by a visiting scientist from Australia. Consequently, I see a lot of this:

I guess this makes me a lab rat!

I've also looked into volunteering with the clouded leopards on site. I've had a good peek at two eight-month old leopards that are visiting, and I'm not sure there is anything more beautiful, or adorable, than these rascals. Although the clouded animal keeper, Jessica, might think otherwise of the very-demanding squawking these two cats can emit. I can hear it all the way down the hall!

Finally, a few of us went hiking in the Shenandoah last weekend. We had so much fun! Martin is a GIS intern who just arrived from Germany, so we took him out to see the last of the changing leaves. Two hikes and 7.5 miles later, we had seen a gorgeous peak and a lovely waterfall. I wondered why I was so exhausted during the first hike (it's not like I hiked every day this past summer), but then I realized that we were on the hike that, in less than a mile, you climb 900 ft in elevation. That's a lot of climbing and hating, in case you were wondering how to measure that. Once we got to the vista, however, all huffing and puffing was lost in the view of the Shenandoah valley in the fall. Scaling huge rocks, we sat atop the valley for almost an hour, taking in the view and having a Lion King moment or two (think Pride Rock).

 

Hike two was longer, but easier, and took us along a beautiful creek down to a waterfall. Instead of hiking to the cliff overlooking the lengthy fall, we opted to hike down into the midst of it. The slope wasn't very steep, but the view and the sounds were beautiful:

All in all, so far so good. I must get to bed- I've got to get into the lab early tomorrow!