Crickets use sound to find mates. The louder their sound is the further it reaches. The textbooks say that they increase their acoustic space using just morphology and mechanics. Song producing wings and females ears resonate at the same frequency enhancing the size of their acoustic space. But some crickets didn’t read the textbook. In this talk, I will present some research on the Oecanthines, beautiful insects called tree crickets. Males tree crickets use a behavioural strategy to make themselves louder. They manufacture a baffle, a tool that makes them louder.

In this talk, Dr. Canning will discuss her recent research on cultivating growth mindset cultures in the classroom—the idea that anyone can develop their abilities over time with good strategies, hard work, and seeking help. Three empirical studies suggest that growth mindset messages from instructors inspire motivation and promote performance for people excluded due to their ethnicity/race, women in STEM, and first-generation college students.

Sensing in Flight: Neural encoding and wing structure interact to shape sensory information
By: Dr. Alison Weber (Daniel & Brunton Lab)

A race to identify the genes that support neutrophil cell migration
By: Dr. Nathan Belliveau (Theriot Lab)

Disentangling mechanisms of Miocene vegetation change
By: Dr. Christopher Schiller (Stromberg Lab)

Beneficial members of the plant microbiome can increase nutrient availability for their hosts, protect their hosts against pathogens, and enhance host resilience against abiotic stress. While previous and ongoing studies of the rhizosphere microbiome have been critical for assessing the impact of specific plant-microbe interactions, their focus has overwhelmingly targeted bacterial and fungal members of the microbiome. Viruses are ubiquitous, outnumbering all other biological entities on the planet, yet they are remarkably understudied in the rhizosphere.

Genetic, developmental, and physiological mechanisms all impact evolutionary trajectories and hence may shape responses to selection. We examined the extent to which genetic and neural mechanisms limit behavioral evolution in guppies by leveraging the parallel evolutionary transitions in Trinidadian guppies. Much prior work has characterized the parallel changes in a suite of social and antipredator behaviors that follow independent colonization of low-predation sites by guppies originally from high-predation localities.