News and Events

November 2009

August 2009

Congratulations to Tom Turner, on his promotion to full Professor and his continuance as Director of the Museum of Southwestern Biology.

Congratulations to Kelly Miller on the award of his National Science Foundation Collections Improvement Grant (Reinvest American funds).   This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

The Museum of Southwestern Biology is located in a geographic region of high environmental heterogeneity and arthropod diversity. Additionally, the arthropod fauna of the Southwest is not as well known as other regions of the United States. The Museum of Southwestern Biology has become an active institution documenting insect diversity for several decades for researchers in ecology and taxonomy, but has never had adequate storage space for all its material. The funding from this NSF grant will allow us to purchase needed cabinets, drawers and other equipment to store our collections securely and make them more available for study. The funding also includes money for students to assist us in preparing specimens and entering collection information into our database (http://www.msb.unm.edu/arthropods/index.html).

Museums are essential partners in research involving DNA analysis, species relationships and distributions. Their holdings document species introductions and extinctions, which are critical for conservation planning. Undergraduate and graduate students receive invaluable training in taxonomy by working with whole specimens, images and databases maintained by museums. Internet access to these databases benefits K-12 students and the general public by providing accurate information and a way to learn about local and regional biodiversity.

July 2009

Congratulations to Joseph Cook and Steven MacDonald on the publication and release of their latest book:

MacDonald, S.O. and Joseph A. Cook. Recent Mammals of Alaska. 2009.

University of Alaska Press. Hardbound: 387 pages. Price: $55.00 U.S. [Amazon: $34.65].

This authoritative reference is the first comprehensive accounting of the 116 mammal species (extinct and extant) that have inhabited Alaska and adjacent waters during the last ten thousand years (the Holocene ). The book has three primary sections:  introduction and overview, individual species accounts, and appendices. Each species account includes taxonomy, common names, systematics, distribution, habitat, status, fossils and range maps. The book is generously illustrated with line drawings by W. D. Berry and others. Appendices summarize information on distribution, specimens, conservation status, introductions and translocations, island faunas, and provide an overview of the pre-Holocene fauna based on the fossil record. Recent Mammals of Alaska is the first accessible reference on this topic for scholars, wildlife managers, students, and amateur naturalists.

June 2009

Congratulations to Chris Frazier and co-authors John Wall (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) and Sharon Grant (The Natural History Museum, London), on the publication and release of: "Initiating a Collection Digitisation Project". This document is designed to give the reader the confidence to get started and to make the right decisions when planning a natural history collection digitisation project. The authors have years of experience working with collections and they have instilled this expertise into this paper so one can more efficiently ask the right questions and make the appropriate plans prior to committing any resources to the task. Published by Global Biodiversity Information Facility http://www.gbif.org

May 2009

The Museum of Southwestern Biology participated in the Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society – Western Division held at the Albuquerque Convention Center May 3 through May 7.

The theme of this year’s meeting “Evolution of the Western Landscape: Balancing Habitat, Land, and Water Management for Fish”. There are a number of special symposia that focus on the management and conservation of New Mexico’s fisheries. In addition, senior personnel from the MSB Division of Fishes and Department of Biology will host a workshop entitled “Genetics and Fish Management” More information can be found at http://www.aznmfishsoup.org/wdafs09/index.htm

April 2009

Congratulations to Jolene Rearick on her new award from the National Science Foundation on her Graduate Research Fellowship Grant. This is a three year fellowship beginning this summer 2009.

March 2009

Congratulations to Kelly Miller on his award from the National Science Foundation: CAREER: Phylogenetic Revisions of South American Water Beetles (Coleoptera: Adephaga: Hydradephaga): A Model for Teaching Systematic Biology

This project will investigate the systematics of South American water beetles (Hydradephaga), including diving beetles, burrowing water beetles, and whirligig beetles. Diving beetles are remarkable for their size and intricate color patterns. They also exhibit interesting differences between males and females; males have adhesive disks on their bodies that let them stick to the females during mating, whereas females have grooves that allow them to resist mating. This project will determine how many species there are in this group of beetles, and how they are related to each other. The project will test whether changes in male adhesive disks are mirrored by corresponding changes in the grooves on the females. DNA sequences will also be used to determine which larvae will grow in to which adults. One product of this work will be an interactive, fully illustrated, on-line identification key for the water beetles of the Neotropics.

This project will provide training in monographic and revisionary systematics for one Ph.D. student, two master's students, and four undergraduates, the latter for at least two years each. Summer workshops will be provided for local-area high-school teachers so they may take knowledge of systematics back to their classrooms. The public school system in Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico are significant minority-serving institutions with Hispanics and Native Americans as major constituents. In addition, two university courses will be developed, one of which will be offered during the summer term, so that students can be taken to South America to collect insects relevant to the revisionary part of the proposed research. These collections will be processed by the students and deposited at the Museum of Southwestern Biology at UNM.

Gino Nearns and Traci Gryzmala recently attended the Annual Meeting of Southwestern Branch of the Entomological Society of America meetings in Stillwater, OK (on the Oklahoma State University campus). They both won awards for their presentations:

"On the longhorned beetles of the world: a phylogeny based on molecular data" (Gino Nearns)

and the title of Traci's presentation was: "Preliminary Morphological Analysis for Systematic Revision of the Longhorned Beetle Genus Elytroleptus Dugés (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae: Cerambycinae: Trachyderini)"

Congratulations to both Gino and Traci!

For thirty-two years the Tucson-Pima County Public Library has presented "Southwest Books of the Year", this year the UNM Press celebrates: "A Field Guide to the Plants and Animals of the Middle Rio Grande Bosque", Jean-Luc E. Cartron, David C. Lightfoot, Jane E. Mygatt, Sandra L. Brantley, and Timothy K. Lowrey. Available from the University of New Mexico Press. http://unmpress.unm.edu/ as one of three books chosen as top thirty-five panelist picks.

February 2009

DARWIN DAY: The Museum of Southwestern Biology hosted an open house with collection tours on Thursday February 12, 2009 in honor of Charles Darwin.

January 2009

SKUNKS! Did you ever want to know more about skunks? Jerry Dragoo, Research Assistant Professor of Biology and Research Associate of the MSB, will be featured on NATURE on Sunday January 25, 2009 on KNME, the local PBS station. The show, Is that Skunk will air at 7:00pm MST. Jerry is an expert on skunks and is frequently called upon when kits are endangered or a stray has been picked up. He rehabs them at his home and when they are sufficiently ready, he releases them back to the wild. Go to: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/is-that-skunk/introduction/4514/ to see a preview of the show.

Division of Amphibians and Reptiles Curator Howard Snell describes a pink iguana in the Galapagos. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Professor Snell is part of a team of researchers that describes a spectacular new iguana species from Isabela island in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador.

Hear the NPR interview with Dr. Snell at https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99211626

A link to the paper can be found at http://www.pnas.org/content/106/2/507

November 2008-Jean Luc Catron, David Lightfoot, Sandra Brantley and Tim Lowrey will be presenting "A Field Guide to the Bosque" at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 7pm.

July 2008--Reaccreditiation of the Mammal Collection. The Division of Mammals underwent a formal reaccreditation review by the Systematic Collections Committee during the American Society of Mammalogists meeting in June 2007 and was fully reaccredited in July

February 2008—National Science Foundation collections improvement grant funded
A $ 259,285 grant (Curation, Databasing, and Integration of the Orphaned Illinois Mammal Collection) was funded. This will provide funding for new cases, drawers, trays and two years of student employment support to integrate the recently acquired University of Illinois Museum of Natural History (UIMNH) mammal collection (ca. 33,000 specimens). Curation, database development, and integration are now underway on this important new collection of primarily southwestern mammals collected from the 1940’s through 1980’s.

January 2008- Creation of Division of Parasitology at MSB. This new Division at MSB is already the third largest helminth collection in North America. A NSF supplemental grant (NSF0726625) was awarded to MSB to transfer the helminth collections of Robert Rausch and the Beringian Coevolution Project from the USDA National Parasite Collection in Beltsville. These specimens were accessioned into space in the wet collections and form the nucleus of this newly created Division.

September 2007--- Undergraduate Opportunities (UNO) training grant awarded ($1,015,000) was awarded to UNM as part of the National Science Foundations Undergraduate research mentoring Program (URM). PI’s Cook and Gannon and several other Curators and Faculty in the Department of Biology secured funding for undergraduate training in science at UNM. This 5 year NSF award will host 12 undergraduate students from underrepresented groups per year in various research projects in the Museum and the Biological Sciences at UNM.

June 2007--American Society of Mammalogists (ASM) Annual Meeting. MSB organized and successfully hosted the 87th meeting from 6-10 June. 580 participants attended. This was one of the largest meetings held recently. UNM has a long history of leadership in this professional society. A number of ASM Past-Presidents (e.g., Drs. Findley, Wilson, Brown), Honorary members (4) and current members of the Board of Directors (5) and Editorial Board (3) are populated by UNM faculty and alumni.

8 October 2006
The Center for Environmental Research, Informatics and Art (CERIA) celebrated the opening of our building. Demonstrations of research and creative projects were featured in and around the CERIA building on the main campus (where the old bookstore was housed) See the collage of photos from the event. The first photo of the ribbon cutting features (l-r) Christopher Mead, Dean College of Fine Arts; Reed Dasenbrock, Provost; Terry Yates, VP for Economic Developement and Research and Vera Norwood, Interim Chair College of Arts and Sciences. All photos are courtesy of Mike Bogan, USGS Curator Emeritus.

News

June 2007
The Museum of Southwestern Biology hosted the 2007 American Society of Mammalogists (ASM) June 6-10, 2007.

September 2006
Professor Don Duszynski, Director of the MSB, has been selected as the 2006 Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Biology at Colorado State University. Don will receive this honor at an award ceremony later this year, when he will give a retrospective lecture about his career in science and research over the last 35 years.

In addition, Dr. Duszynski has been invited as one of 25 international scientists, to serve on a Sloan Foundation workshop To Resolve Microorganism Taxonomic and Cultural Collection Problems Arising from the New Barcoding Initiatives. The workshop will be held in Portland, Maine, November 6-7, 2006. DNA barcoding is a methodology for identifying species using a short DNA sequence. It is purported to be a reliable, inexpensive and easily accessible tool for both taxonomic specialists and non-specialists (e.g., government officials, professionals in health and agriculture). There are several issues and problems, however, that need to be addressed before barcoding can be instituted, especially for single-celled microorganisms (protists). Linking barcodes to accurately identified species represents a large hurdle that must be overcome. The Sloan Foundation workshop will address problems that arise as species DNA barcodes are generated by protists.

August 2006
The UNM Biology Department has concluded the search for two new tenure-track faculty positions; Christopher Witt will replace David Ligon as Curator of the MSB Bird Division and Kelly Miller will replace Manuel Molles as the Curator of Arthropods. Both David and Manuel retired in 2005 after long and distinguished careers in biology.

May 2006
The UNM Museum of Southwestern Biology and the USGS Arid Lands Field Station co-hosted the joint meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and the Natural Science Collections Alliance, May 23-27, 2006. The meeting theme was "The Road to Productive Partnerships."

08 August 2005
This month's Geoworld Magazine,"The Business Monthly for the GIS Industry," includes a feature article on the Biogeomancer Project. Biogeomancer is an international consortium developing an online workbench, web services, and desktop applications that will provide georeferencing for collectors, curators and users of natural history specimens. The project is co-managed by John Wieczorek from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley and MSB's Chris Frazier. MSB's Biogeomancer team includes Teri Neville, GIS coordinator for Natural Heritage New Mexico, and Tomas Giermakowski, collections manager for the Division of Amphibians and Reptiles.

02 August 2005
Today's Albuquerque Journal includes an article "World on Web: Database Holds Plants, Animals" with great pictures of the Herbarium collection manager, Jane Mygatt, and the Herbarium specimen imaging system. The article follows Yale graduate student Stephen Smith's usage of the INRAM Gateway to New Mexico Biodiversity to find honeysuckle specimens in the UNM Herbarium that he needs for his dissertation work.

17 May 2004
MSB Highlights, a posting of divisional and program developments is released.

© David Lightfoot