Saltz Lab News:

I am excited to welcome a new PhD student to the lab, Gihan Jayasinghe! Gihan is really interested in how behavioral plasticity influences population-level evolutionary processes, at the phenotypic and genomic levels.  Welcome Gihan!

Congratulations to PhD student Marina Hutchins, who won Best Talk at Monday's Graduate Student Symposium! Go Marina!

Marina was recently profiled for the Wiess School of Natural Sciences website. Go here to read the interview which features Marina's reflections on her exemplary research and outreach accomplishments: https://naturalsciences.rice.edu/graduate-student-and-postdoc-research-profiles/marina-hutchins

Eric's research on genetic variation in social structure has been featured on Rice News! Check out this short article (https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/popularity-runs-families) and fun video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi9atHy5vv8).

The work describes Eric's dissertation research, and specifically their recent findings that genotypes differ in how they are connected socially to other flies (as described by social network analysis). Further, the adaptive value of these social connections varied across nutritional environments, suggesting that there is no one "right" way to be social as a fly. Instead, variation in selection pressures should adaptively maintain the presence of diverse genotypes in the population. Read the original article, published in Nature Communications, here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23672-1

Congratulations Eric!

Lots of exciting updates from the lab, that I've neglected to post about! First up, Dr. Eric Wice and Dr. Madeline Burns both successfully defended their PhDs! Eric in Spring 2021 and Madeline in Summer 2021. Both of their defenses were phenomenal, obviously. You can see Eric's defense at this link! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGu0YNyxaVs

Madeline decided to be brave as the first student ever in EEB to conduct a hybrid (in person / zoom) defense! Let's just say... no video survived. It went great though, despite the technical difficulties!

Meanwhile, Dr. Lea Pollack joined the lab as a postdoc to study the evolutionary interplay between social dynamics and evolutionary traps!

As covid restrictions have eased, our lab is growing! Please get in touch if you are interested in joining as PhD student or postdoc.

Marina Hutchins has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) to continue and expand her research on the production and use of social information in fruit flies! This competitive award will also support Marina's robust outreach work. Congratulations Marina!

We had a fantastic time at the 2019 ABS meeting in Chicago! We found an overabundance of exciting talks and inspiring conversations. Here's some photos of a few highlights...

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Long overdue post! We continued our pooter olympics tradition in 2019. This was our first (and hopefully only) pooter olympics in our temporary lab space.

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Post-grads teamed up against undergrads in an epic battle of lab skills!  The post-grads won, which, honestly, is probably for the best.

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This year's Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium (RURS) featured 3 posters from our lab! Allison Jaffe, Ceyda Kural, and Simone Maddox presented their senior thesis research. Behold!

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Thanks to everyone for a fantastic RURS

Madeline passed her qualifying exam and is now a PhD candidate! Go Madeline go!

Note: I failed to capture the moment so this champagne opening is a re-enactment

Stephanie Zhao, a superstar Saltz lab undergraduate, describes her experiences in the lab so far:

"Lessons from Fruit Flies

Pooting? Watching fruit flies lunge at one another? Painting fruit flies? If you are slightly confused as to what these things are/what doing these things are like, you have come to the right place! For this blog post, I just want to briefly touch on some of the unusual skills and things I have gotten to do in lab as well as point out one of the main lessons I learned from working there.

First, please let me introduce myself – my name is Stephanie Zhao, and I am a rising senior Ecology & Evolutionary Biology major at Rice University. I joined the Saltz lab in the fall of my sophomore year and have been a part of the lab ever since. 😊

Now back to the lab matters at hand – what is pooting? Pooting was one of the first things I learned how to do once I joined the lab. It involves inhaling quickly into a small tube to draw a fruit fly up into the tube’s other end, with a small piece of mesh in between to prevent the fruit fly from being swallowed. The fruit fly can then be transported from its previous test tube into the small petri dishes that we used to conduct aggression trials. The aggression trials were a part of how we studied behavior in the lab. After pooting various flies (separated by genotype and whether they were fed drugs or not) into specific petri dish arenas, we observed the flies and noted how often they lunged at one another. The last interesting thing (but certainly not the only other interesting thing) I learned in the lab skills-wise was that it was possible to paint fruit flies and how to do so. To do this, we take specific flies that we want to identify during behavioral observations and then paint a small dot on their pronotum. While this takes quite a bit of hand-eye coordination and quite a few flies have been unintentionally sacrificed in the attempts of this, I can say that I have gotten at least a little better at it this past year.

With that said, my time in the lab thus far has been quite a learning experience, both skills wise through techniques discussed above and others, increasing my general scientific awareness through the papers that we read and discuss during lab meetings, and in everyday life through what I have realized upon reflecting on my lab experiences.

Noticing the little things around me has been perhaps the biggest non-technical lesson I have learned. Through the sorting of thousands of individual fruit flies by gender to painting them and watching their behavior, I have been encouraged to take in more of the little details around me. Easily missed or underappreciated things like the sun shining through the leaves of the trees on campus, the small ants artfully creating a trail on the side of the path, and how nice it is when the breeze blows the right direction so your hair is gently swept behind your face rather than in front are a few examples of things I feel I more fully appreciate because of my time in the lab.

If you had asked me what I would work with in college research, I honestly don’t think fruit flies would have been anywhere in my answer (or even the top 20 of potential answers). However, these past two years in the Saltz lab have been incredibly enlightening and I am so thankful for the opportunity to have been a part of it."

Thank you Stephanie!

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Congratulations Eric for totally rocking his Qualifying Exam to become an official PhD candidate! Woo!

We have a new paper out that represents a collaboration with Judy Stamps and Pete Biro, and Pete's student David. In this follow-up to our previous paper on learning, we test Bayesian updating theory to ask: can genetic differences in learning be predicted a priori?  We find that the answer is YES! Check it out in Evolution here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/evo.13585

New paper lead by postdoc Nick Keiser examines the relationships between genotype, social dynamics, and disease transmission in flies.  Check it out in Behavioral Ecology!