The O’Connor lab at WSN! From left to right: Nicole Knight, Jen Sunday, Natalie Caulk, Mary O’Connor, Coreen Forbes, Joey Bernhardt and Matt Siegel.
It isn’t often that the whole lab gets the chance to attend a conference together so this year’s WSN meeting was a special event for the O’Connor lab. Natalie, Nicole, Matt, Mary, Joey and Coreen all made the 4 hour trek from UBC (Vancouver, Canada) to Tacoma Washington, the host city for this year’s conference. It was definitely worth the border delays!
WSN is a yearly meeting of ecologists held in various western American cities. Despite the name, attendees come from all over North America and beyond (I met a number of people from European, Asian and Australian Universities). UBC, SFU and UVic were also well represented due to our proximity to Tacoma. Being a newbie to this conference, I was surprised by its strong marine focus (not that I’m complaining!).
The conference was kicked off with an exciting bit of controversy that many of us didn’t even know existed! Michael Soulé, the “godfather of conservation” spoke of the importance of unaltered wild places and what is lost when conservation efforts are watered down to meet human demands. Katie Arkema, of The Nature Capital Project, Peter Kareiva, of The Nature Conservancy, and Patrick Christie, a social scientist from the University of Washington, shot back claiming the only way forward is to integrate human needs tightly into conservation efforts. There were suggestions that giant invasive rats are just as good as native fauna if functional biodiversity is maintained. The Nature Conservancy *may* have been lumped into charities for people (and not the environment) and traditional conservationists, or “you people”, were referred to as interesting study subjects. While good points were raised all around, I came away feeling a sad nostalgia for Soulé’s traditional conservationist viewpoint which seems to largely be a thing of the past.
In the coming days there were well over 100 student and researcher talks. The bar is set high at WSN! I was absolutely overwhelmed by the quality of the research and presentation. Most talks were strongly rooted in ecological and evolutionary theory and were also very interesting from a natural history perspective. Though I may be a little biased, I was especially impressed with the amazing work coming out of the O’Connor and Harley labs. Nicole, our amazing “undergraduated” lab manager, set eelgrass ecologists’ fears to rest with her talk on the neutral effects of the introduced eelgrass species, Zostera japonica, on epifaunal diversity. Natalie gave a flawless account of her experiments exploring the effects of warming on the edibility of algal resources. Joey treated audiences to an interesting and unique perspective using functional traits to predict the nutritional content of seafood. Matt made us laugh with some unexpected results of warming on a population of Tigriopus californicus copepods and of course Mary gave us a thought provoking perspective on warming and trophic structure. I, on the other hand, only had the incredibly difficult task of choosing which one of the simultaneous 6 talks to attend every 15 minutes. Life is so hard sometimes!
-Coreen
It isn’t often that the whole lab gets the chance to attend a conference together so this year’s WSN meeting was a special event for the O’Connor lab. Natalie, Nicole, Matt, Mary, Joey and Coreen all made the 4 hour trek from UBC (Vancouver, Canada) to Tacoma Washington, the host city for this year’s conference. It was definitely worth the border delays!
WSN is a yearly meeting of ecologists held in various western American cities. Despite the name, attendees come from all over North America and beyond (I met a number of people from European, Asian and Australian Universities). UBC, SFU and UVic were also well represented due to our proximity to Tacoma. Being a newbie to this conference, I was surprised by its strong marine focus (not that I’m complaining!).
The conference was kicked off with an exciting bit of controversy that many of us didn’t even know existed! Michael Soulé, the “godfather of conservation” spoke of the importance of unaltered wild places and what is lost when conservation efforts are watered down to meet human demands. Katie Arkema, of The Nature Capital Project, Peter Kareiva, of The Nature Conservancy, and Patrick Christie, a social scientist from the University of Washington, shot back claiming the only way forward is to integrate human needs tightly into conservation efforts. There were suggestions that giant invasive rats are just as good as native fauna if functional biodiversity is maintained. The Nature Conservancy *may* have been lumped into charities for people (and not the environment) and traditional conservationists, or “you people”, were referred to as interesting study subjects. While good points were raised all around, I came away feeling a sad nostalgia for Soulé’s traditional conservationist viewpoint which seems to largely be a thing of the past.
In the coming days there were well over 100 student and researcher talks. The bar is set high at WSN! I was absolutely overwhelmed by the quality of the research and presentation. Most talks were strongly rooted in ecological and evolutionary theory and were also very interesting from a natural history perspective. Though I may be a little biased, I was especially impressed with the amazing work coming out of the O’Connor and Harley labs. Nicole, our amazing “undergraduated” lab manager, set eelgrass ecologists’ fears to rest with her talk on the neutral effects of the introduced eelgrass species, Zostera japonica, on epifaunal diversity. Natalie gave a flawless account of her experiments exploring the effects of warming on the edibility of algal resources. Joey treated audiences to an interesting and unique perspective using functional traits to predict the nutritional content of seafood. Matt made us laugh with some unexpected results of warming on a population of Tigriopus californicus copepods and of course Mary gave us a thought provoking perspective on warming and trophic structure. I, on the other hand, only had the incredibly difficult task of choosing which one of the simultaneous 6 talks to attend every 15 minutes. Life is so hard sometimes!
-Coreen