The 2015 Technical Meeting: You Should Have Been There

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.

Sujana Rapakheti, an undergraduate from Cameron University, discusses her poster with Cameron University science dean and new OAS president Terry Conley.

Ingo Schlupp gives his talk at the noon banquet. In this slide he discussed relatedness (as between the two twins) and its effects on altruism, as revealed by Bill Hamilton.

Terry Conley presents a plaque to outgoing president Stan Rice.

Terry Conley presents an OAS Lifetime Achievement Award to Susan Barber.

Stan Rice, Immediate Past President

Spring 2015 Field Meeting

The Oklahoma Academy of Science had its spring field meeting this past weekend at Sequoyah State Park near Muskogee. If you missed it, this essay will help you regret it. Fortunately we missed the torrential rains that started falling today. It was gently cool, and softly overcast—which made the green of the new leaves very intense. On Saturday morning and afternoon we had field trips. I accompanied Gloria Caddell for the botany hikes.

We saw beautiful and interesting plants. Examples include the mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum in the Berberidaceae):

And spiderwort (Tradescantia ernestiana in the Commelinaceae):

We also saw the mycotrophic orchid Corallorhiza wisteriana. It does not have chlorophyll. It gets its nutrition from decaying wood. But not directly. It is mycotrophic rather than saprophytic because mutualistic fungi absorb the nutrients from rotting wood and provide them to the orchid.

On one of our hikes we visited a nearby Boy Scout camp owned and operated by the family of Andrea Blair, a graduate student at Oklahoma State University Tulsa campus. Here, Andrea is talking with Ken Hobson, former president of OAS and professor of biology at OU.

We saw a magnificently blooming buckeye (Aesculus glabra in the Hippocastanaceae). But it was on the other side of the creek so I had to wade across to get photos of it. This would have been a simple matter except that the rocks were just the right size to hurt my tender old feet.

Among the student participants was John Williams and his sons and nephew from Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Mia Revels of Northeastern Oklahoma State University and Gloria Caddell of University of Central Oklahoma brought their classes (ornithology and systematic botany, respectively). The photo shows John's young son soaking up the wonders of the forest.

Especially in the afternoon, the field trips combined forces to gain a multi-disciplinary view of nature. Liz Bergey of OU found a slime mold. And we all wished for a competent paleontologist when we found abundant fossils near the lake shore. In this photo, you can see many crinoids (a kind of echinoderm, with stalks that look like stacks of coins), corals, and bryozoans (now known as ecoprocts). The bryozoans were of the genus Archimedes and looked more like a fish backbone. That’s what I thought they were at first, but I never saw any “fish ribs” with the “backbones,” which meant I had to be wrong.

On Friday and Saturday evenings, guest speakers provided fascinating presentations. On Friday, Charles Brown of University of Tulsa told us about his over three decades of research into the costs, benefits, and evolution of colony behavior in cliff swallows. You think you’ve had bedbugs? But a single little swallow nest can have hundreds of them. On Saturday, Ron Bonett of University of Tulsa told us about salamanders in Oklahoma, and about the repeated evolution of species in which juveniles become sexually reproductive. In the photo, field meeting organizer Connie Murray (of Tulsa Community College Metro campus) talks with Charles Brown.

Every spring and fall, OAS has wonderful field meetings. There are always lots of interesting things to see, and wonderful people to explore with. My thanks to everyone who made the meeting a success, including our Executive Director David Bass who had to make sure everything happened.

Stan Rice, president

Encourage your students to come to the spring field meeting!

Hi everyone,

The spring field meeting is coming up, April 10-12 at Sequoyah State Park. Information will be available soon on the OAS website. Some of you may already be planning on bringing a lot of students as part of your classes. But if not, I suggest an alternative, one that I have used for many years in the past.

I offer extra credit to students for participating in the field meetings. I am usually unable to offer them a ride, so they have to get themselves to the field meeting site and back. Quite a few of them have managed to do so. I require them, for extra credit, to participate in a morning or an afternoon field trip on Saturday. For distant locations, I offer a little more extra credit. How much? You can figure that out.

Of course, there is the concern that students may show up and not pay attention. It is conceivable that a student might show up and just stand around and spit tobacco. (I wish I were making this up. It has happened on required class field trips.) Also, there is the concern that I have some evidence to show that the students fully participated in the trip. To accomplish these things, I have each student write a unique one-page summary of what they learned. This gets them to be fully engaged and gives me documentation. Since, nearly without exception, my students who have come to OAS have been highly motivated, they are happy to do this.

This is something to think ahead about as the date gets closer and closer.

Stan Rice, president