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