It was a hot, hot day but we got some good field work done for Tim's dissertation project, along with his student Mina.
Also, look at all that Gracilaria!!!

In June 2018, my colleague Amy Fowler and I met up with our Parasite Ecology intern, Hyejoo Ro, at Shoals Marine lab to get her internship project up and running. We then started teaching our Marine Parasitology class at SML and had a fantastic group of students who learned a lot of about marine parasites. We are super excited about the work being done out at Shoals this summer!

I received a travel grant from Gothenburg University to spend 3 weeks at The Sven Lovén Centre for Marine Sciences on the island of Tjärnö for research related to ecotypes in the North Atlantic marine snail Littorina saxatilis. I also co-convened and co-moderated a special session on the evolutionary biology of marine invasions at the Marine Evolution conference in Stromstad, Sweden from May 15-17, 2018. I even got the opportunity to be in the presence of royalty (the Swedish princess came to a special meeting at Tjarno on marine plastics). See images below from my trip and from the conference!

Congratulations to Christofer Brothers, who completed his honors thesis and was honored for being part of the Honors College at ECU. He did fantastic work in our lab and we will miss him! 

I was excited to be part of a series of blogs related to being a parasite ecologist (with advice to students interested in parasite ecology)! The link to the blog post is here: ​https://parasiteecology.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/how-to-become-a-successful-parasite-ecologist-part-vi-april-blakeslee/

.My colleague, Dr. Amy Fowler (GMU), and I did some recent field sampling in Texas in inland, nearly freshwater lakes to look for a crab (Rhithropanopeus harrisii) that has invaded these reservoirs. After the heartache of not finding the crab in several locations, we finally found them! They will now be part of several ongoing ecological and evolutionary ecology experiments with collaborators (Dr. Fowler and Dr. Carolyn Tepolt, WHOI).

On April 16th, we attended the URCA ceremony to honor students receiving these competitive research awards. Corey Winkler, who is doing his honors thesis in our lab, received one of these awards. Congratulations, Corey! The picture below also includes other Biology faculty and students, including (L to R), Ariel Fricke, Dr. Krista McCoy, Kyra Price, Dr. Erin Field, Corey Winkler, and Dr. April Blakeslee.

Recently our lab participated in several local, regional, and national/international conferences, including the Benthic Ecology Meeting, ECU's Research and Creativity Achievement Week (RCAW), and the Atlantic Estuarine Research Society (AERS). Our most recent conference at AERS saw 2 of the 4 student awards go to students (Collin Love and Tim Lee) associated with our lab. Huzzah!! I am very proud of my students and all the amazing work they've been doing. Pictures below!

A former summer intern of my lab (up in Long Island), Laura Moritzen, has recently published her summer research on Palaemon grass shrimp and their abundance/distributions in natural and artificial habitats. It's very exciting to see this work published!

Distribution and tidal variation of palaemonid shrimps (Decapoda: Caridea: Palaemonidae) in artificial and natural habitats
Laura C Moritzen, Michael Roy, Gabriela W Smalley, April M H Blakeslee
Journal of Crustacean Biology, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcbiol/ruy017
Published: 01 March 2018

https://academic.oup.com/jcb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jcbiol/ruy017/4916089?guestAccessKey=be07c850-0e1f-4bfe-8017-3741c068b28d

We had a rainy start to our day but then it was absolutely beautiful by the end! We got some really great and enthusiastic assistance from several citizen scientists at our two sites at Goose Creek State Park. Here are some images courtesy of Vickie Pointer, and a few additional ones taken by myself at the bottom. Thanks so much to everyone who came out and helped us collect crabs, fish, and count associated organisms with our crab condos!