Bottlenecks

Sweet sassy molassy! It has been quite a couple weeks. I'm all moved in to my new digs, which are furnished-ish, and now I'm ready to mold young minds next week as the teaching assistant for an evolution class. Heck yeah! I highly recommend Sandra Brown's biography of the Origin of the Species. The instructor for the course I'm teaching recommended it to me and it was a quick and entertaining read on the history and impact of one of Darwin's greatest hits.

Last Sunday I had a lovely respite from teaching prep and such when my lab group had brunch together down at a surf club on the beach. It was an unusually sunny day and we ended up horsin' around afterwards. My buddy Roz took some great photos...
I've just submitted another Target Taupo article as well, this one on bottlenecks (a historical reduction in population size). So far I can't say much about the trout populations that I'm studying other than they've been through a bottleneck. If you want to know more I can send you a copy of the article - basically it's pretty intuitive that the population would go through a bottleneck since only a few individuals from the larger California population were brought here as founders. We'll see how well the article comes off - it's the first time I've really tried to address a sticky science-y sort of issue in layman's terms. I'll get plenty of practice at this, though, over the next couple years.

Speaking of California, my collaboration (to try to determine the number and location of the origins of NZ rainbow trout) with trout geneticists there is well underway, and hopefully will lead to me spending some time in Santa Cruz at the genetics lab there (maybe for next year's American summer!). Right now a little bit of California sun sounds pretty much perfect.

For the time being my own "spare" time will continue to be bottlenecked down to pretty much nothing (throw lab work on top of what I've already listed here), but you know me - if I sit still I loose my mind.:)