The 104th Annual
Technical Meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences has just concluded, and
with it my term as president. I am now the Immediate Past President. The
president for 2016-2017 will be Terry Conley, a dean at Cameron University. The
new president elect, who will become president in 2018, is Adam Ryburn of
Oklahoma City University. During Adam’s term I will devolve from being
Immediate Past President to being Le Président Ancien, a position now held by
Craig Clifford, and then after that I will be Le Président Vieux, a position
now filled by Ken Hobson.
The OAS Technical meetings are an excellent venue to
connect with our fellow scientists from around the state. It is also an
excellent place for students to present their first research results in a
non-threatening environment. Our passion at OAS is to nurture an ongoing
culture of science in Oklahoma. It was inspiring to see so many students giving
oral presentations and posters.
The meeting organizer, Adam Ryburn, succeeded in bringing
OAS further away from the rut it had started to get into, of being merely a
Friday morning event. The active and interesting poster session was in the
afternoon. There was also an all-day symposium on climate change, which lasted
until 4:00, with the last presentation being mine. A big “thank you” to the
stalwart holdouts for the last talk.
I wanted to mention something really interesting I
learned at the symposium. The four symposium presentations preceding mine (by
graduate student Christopher Dunn and faculty members Chris Butler, James
Cressey, and Wayne Lord, all of the University of Central Oklahoma), concerned
the rat lungworm (Angiostrongylus
cantonensis). As the name suggests, this parasite prefers Norway and brown
rats. But in North America it has jumped to a new host, the cotton rat (which
is a different genus). Most of us understand that, with global warming,
tropical conditions (and their associated parasites) might spread poleward. But
it’s not that simple. You can use ecological and epidemiological modeling to
predict where the known hosts will live, but if the parasite jumps to a new
host, you can get totally unanticipated results. And, as Wayne Lord explained,
this can happen in at least two ways. Within the overall trend of global
warming, we expect greater weather extremes. During extreme flooding (which
Oklahoma experienced in the spring of 2015), parasites that prefer wet
conditions can spread to new locations. And during extreme droughts (which
Oklahoma experienced most recently in 2011 and 2012), hosts that normally stay
apart might end up nuzzling each other in little wetland pockets, increasing
the chances that the parasite will jump to a new host. One thing you can
certainly say will happen with global warming: inevitable surprises.
It is difficult to identify a “high point” for the
meeting, but it would have to be the noon banquet presentation by Ingo Schlupp
of the University of Oklahoma, who studies social life (including sexual
selection) in freshwater fishes. Somehow, and even Ingo is not sure how, a
female molly (and they all clonal females) can tell a clonal sister from a more
distantly-related one and behave accordingly. Even though these mollies are
clonal and do not have meiosis, they need sperm in order to stimulate
reproduction. That is, sperm from a different species of fish. The sperm do not
fertilize the eggs, however. Thank you, Ingo, for a very interesting
presentation!
Ingo got famous for his discovery that female mollies
preferred the males of related fish species that had mustaches (or what would
be called mustaches on humans). As a result of this research, Ingo became
probably the only scientist to be immortalized in a limerick on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on June 26, 2010.
I read the limerick during Ingo’s introduction:
At me, the girl
fish let their lust flash,
I’m well-groomed,
which makes hearts in their bust dash.
The ladies all flip
At my hairy lip,
The molly fish all
dig a…
Congratulations to Ulrich Melcher for getting the answer:
mustache! Ingo is also the only
Oklahoma scientist to have his name made into a verb. NPR host Peter Sagal
said, “It seems hipster girls aren’t the only rare species attracted to guys
with mustaches. According to a new study by German biologist Ingo Schlupp,
female Mexican molly fish also prefer males with fuzzy upper lips. Schlupp and
her [!] associates paired females with male mollies, some with whiskery faces,
some without. And in every case the female schlupped the mustached fish.”
Here are some photographs from the meeting. If you wish
to let OAS know about other events at the meeting, or have other photographs to
share, please send them to me at srice@se.edu.
Terry Conley presents a plaque to outgoing president Stan Rice.
Stan Rice, Immediate Past President
