Congratulations to EEB graduate student Miranda Chen. Miranda was selected as a recipient of the 2018–2019 Shipley-Swann Graduate Fellowship. By receiving this fellowship, Miranda is being recognized as one of the most promising graduate and professional students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
We are pleased to offer three mini-term courses this year. We are confident that you will love each of these courses. Email kcoulte4@utk.edu to override pre-req
Natural History of the Smokies – 70213 – CRN 461-001
“Natural History of the Great Smoky Mountains”. This course is a field ecology course that includes a one-week field trip. Course Fee of $350 to cover housing, transportation & food. Questions? Contact Gary McCracken or Randy Small **This course can be petitioned to count for a “Field or Lab Emphasis Course” for the EEB concentration**
Avian Diversification – 70235 – EEB 461 – 002
Avian Diversity will provide a general overview of avian systematics, evolution, ecology, and behavior. Other special topics will include physiology, migration and orientation, mating systems and parental behavior, communication, and conservation biology. Students will be expected to actively participate in class discussions. duration: 3 week course from May 9 – 30 times: 3 days/week in class: Dabney-Buehler Hall 575, 1-4pm, 2 days/week outdoors: mornings to early afternoon.
Theory in Ethnobiology – 70260 – EEB 461 – 004
What are the theories and hypotheses commonly tested in ethnobiology? What types of data are collected to test these hypotheses? How are these data analyzed to understand the link between plant and culture, the way in which human, by selecting certain organs on certain plant species in specific location, and at some specific time, have shaped their environment? How environmental feedback constrained the nature and extent of human-plant interactions? The ultimate goal of this class is to guide students in conducting hypothesis/theory-driven research in ethnobiology. We will review various theories and hypotheses in ethnobiology. Second, we will learn the different methods used in ethnobotanical research and finally we will identify the major types of data commonly collected in this field and how these data are analyzed. At the end of this course students will be able to develop and test simple hypotheses in ethnobiology and discuss how they fit into the broad ethnobiology literature. Although this course method is applied to ethnobiology, the course can be of interest to students interested in learning about how to use the scientific method in biology in general.
At the heart of a liberal arts education is the intersection of science and art. In his new book, Elements of Chance, Art Stewart, adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, presents science-flavored poems for scientists.
“Poetry and science are not at odds with one another,” Stewart says. “Rather, these two great constructs support each other, arm in arm.”
Evidence of the interconnectedness exists in several forms – from the patterns of a pinecone that match those of the Fibonacci sequence to using high-powered equipment to examine the beginning of the universe or life itself. Science and poetry, or art in any form, requires humans to use all five senses to examine and observe in order to come to a conclusion.
“The task of communicating science through poetry has been challenging because many scientists ignore poetry and many poets, insofar as possible, avoid science,” Stewart says.
One opportunity for students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to examine the beauty of science through poetry is the ORISE Science Poetry Contest.
STEM is a familiar phrase to most people, but a new acronym is gaining momentum: STEAM, or science, technology, engineering, ART, and math. To recognize this interconnectedness, ORISE is sponsoring a science-poetry competition during April, which is also National Poetry Month.
“I’ve been at the task of trying to nudge science a bit closer to the arts, and the arts a bit closer to the sciences, for nearly 20 years, through poetry,” Stewart says. “I look forward to seeing what the students come up with and hope our EEB students take this opportunity to participate.”
The contest is open to all high school and university students. Visit the website to learn more.
EEB Assitant Professor Mona Papes will give a seminar in the Geography department on Thursday, March 29. Click here to view the poster.
Why Geography Matters to Ecologists: Geographical Patterns of Biodiversity
Thursday, March 29th in the Burchfiel Geography Building Room 301. Reception with cookies and coffee to start at 3:30, talk from 4:00-5:00.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research interests, focused on using ecological niche modeling and spatial data to study species’ distributions. To
illustrate my research interests, I will discuss studies (in progress or completed) aiming to detect plant species richness, plant traits, and estimate the
potential distribution of invasive species. In the last part of my talk, I will introduce the Spatial Analysis Lab, an interdisciplinary recharge center established last year in NIMBioS through a partnership between Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Geography, NIMBioS, and the College of Arts and Sciences.
By Brooks Clark (’16)
Among the pleasures of working in UT alumni relations are the occasions when long, lost alums or their families come back to campus and we get to revisit the old sights and introduce them to the new show. Last summer, Tom and Claire Huffaker, a son and daughter-in-law of Carl Huffaker (’38, ’39), made their first visit to see the university that Huffaker, who died in 1995, had remembered fondly. They had made their pilgrimage to Knoxville to learn more about a story that was an important part of their family lore.
As Carl Huffaker had always told it, he had graduated from high school in Kentucky in 1933, worked a half year for Civilian Conservation Corps, part of FDR’s New Deal, and then a few months for the Tennessee Valley Authority, another part of FDR’ New Deal, preparing land for inundation behind Norris Dam, which was then under construction about 30 miles north of Knoxville. Huffaker, a farm boy fascinated by insects, wanted to enroll in UT’s entomology program, one of the better programs in the region. But he couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition.
Huffaker said he met with UT’s president and proposed that, if he were allowed to pay in-state fees, he would make Tennessee proud. “You seem like a fine young man,” the president had replied. “You have a deal.” Tom and Claire Huffaker didn’t know the name of the kindly president or any other details about this meeting in 1934—only that it made the rest of Carl Huffaker’s life possible and caused him to speak fondly of UT.
Huffaker had gone on to earn two UT degrees—his bachelor’s in entomology in 1938 and a master’s in plant ecology in 1939. He earned his PhD in entomology/ecology from Ohio State in 1942 and taught entomology at the University of California at Berkeley for five decades, carrying out groundbreaking research and becoming a national leader in his field.
Since I had worked for TVA and valued its history, especially from its inception in the darkest days of the Depression, I was especially interested in showing the Huffakers around campus. When I met Tom, I learned quickly that he had been born and raised in Berkeley, California, where his father had been a longtime professor. I was pleased to learn that Tom was not only born in the same year that I was, 1956, but he was also, a “late hatch (pioneer language),” as his father put it in a family remembrance—born a few years after his older siblings.
We started at the Hill, where Carl Huffaker had had his entomology classes and labs. When we passed the John C. Hodges Library, I noted that Huffaker would have taken freshman English from Hodges or a professor following Hodges’ innovative method of marking papers that in 1941 became the Harbrace College Handbook. When we came to Neyland Stadium, where freshman English papers had for decades been stored in a vault, Tom mentioned that his father had worked in a dining hall that served the football team, a job that came with one healthy meal per day. Huffaker often recalled in later years that, lacking any money, for the rest of each day after his meal at the dining hall, he was always hungry. In those Depression years, others had it worse, but his childhood had prepared him well to get by in tough times.
Huffaker had been born in Monticello, Kentucky, on September 30, 1914, the fifth of six sons of Dewitt and Elizabeth Huffaker. Dewitt was shot to death when Carl was three, leaving Elizabeth to raise her boys alone. Augmenting the income from the family farm as a county clerk—the county’s first female elected official—she was determined to provide her sons the wherewithal to rise above their rural poverty.
While his brothers were unruly mountain boys, Huffaker had suffered a torn Achilles tendon as child, which left him physically impaired and inclined to studiousness, even after he had the tendon repaired as a young adult. As a child, he grew intrigued by the pigeons that roosted in the barn, which led to a lifelong passion for pigeon racing. Huffaker had also been intrigued by the impact of pests on agriculture. In a Monticello High biology class, he took special note when he read a statement by US Department of Agriculture entomologist Leland Ossian Howard that his field would need many young people in future years.
With jobs scarce in 1933, Elizabeth had signed her son up for a six-month tour with the Civilian Conservation Corps after high school. Huffaker and some of his friends were sent to California, where he built campgrounds and did fire-lookout scouting in an isolated back canyon close to Glendale. Of his $30 monthly pay, he was given $5. The rest was sent home to his family, as was the CCC custom of the day.
When Huffaker returned home, his mother presented him with his $150 of earnings and instructed him to go out and get an education. She also signed him up for another New Deal program, the TVA, and its first project, Norris Dam, in Clinton, Tennessee. “My first job was to work in the reservoir clearance program,” wrote Huffaker. “Because of my interest in entomology and botany, I was assigned to survey the whole 800-mile reservoir shoreline for malarial mosquitoes and debris collected on the banks, which was important to the malarial mosquito breeding.”
Drawn to the University of Tennessee’s entomology program, Huffaker enrolled that fall but found that, with just $150 he could not afford out-of-state tuition.
Tom asked me what the difference would have been in 1934. I asked Research Librarian Alesha Shumar, who sent us pages from the UT Record. Out-of-state tuition was then $171 a year, plus $75 in registration fees. Tuition was free to in-state students. Registration fees were $45. Dorm rooms were $25-$30 per month for all male students.
With a little research, I also found that the president Huffaker met with was Harcourt Morgan. Perhaps by lucky happenstance, Morgan was a professor of entomology (and zoology) and one of the three charter directors of TVA. It seemed likely to me that Huffaker had impressed Morgan by describing his TVA work in mosquito remediation the summer before. Huffaker was certainly lucky that, in his TVA role, Morgan was a visionary of sorts, committed to revolutionizing the economy, the river system, the soil, and the farming practices of the Tennessee Valley.
In 1936, while still a student, Huffaker had married Saralyn Knight, a Maryville College student he met while they were both working on Norris Dam. Huffaker worked at night in a blue-printing machine laboratory and spent three summers, beginning in 1937, working on malaria control for TVA. They had a son, Ronald, in 1938, another son, Hal, in 1940, and a daughter, Carolyn, in 1942, when Huffaker earned his PhD from Ohio State.
During the war years, Huffaker worked on antimalaria efforts in Colombia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. “Carl was amazing in his ability to analyze large amounts of complex experimental data and quickly reach accurate, sensible conclusions,” said a colleague.
Huffaker joined the University of California in 1946. His first assignment, in partnership with the US Department of Agriculture, was to lead the effort to biologically control the Klamath weed, also known as St. John’s wort, which had become a scourge on California range lands. By introducing insects that fed exclusively on the weed, they were able to eradicate the problem. It was the first of many of Huffaker’s innovations in biological pest control that led to incalculable benefits to agriculture, especially in California.
He was among the first entomologists to study the use of DDT to control mosquito populations. Then, after DDT was banned, he played a pioneering leadership role in developing and introducing his seminal proposal on Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. In a six-year project that drew on the expertise of hundreds of scientists from various disciplines and culminated in the 1978 proposal “The Principles, Strategies, and Tactics of Pest Population Regulation and Control in Major Crop Ecosystems” outlined a methodology for, as described by George Kennedy in the summer 2004 issue of American Entomologist, “improved, ecologically oriented pest-management systems that optimized long-term costs and benefits of crop protection to the farmer, society, and the environment.”
The Huffaker Project, as it came to be known, “played a seminal role in training IPM scientists and building the infrastructure necessary for the continued development and adoption of IPM in the United States.” A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Huffaker published hundreds of papers. He retired from Berkeley in 1984 but remained active on campus until his death on October 10, 1995.
As we returned to Tyson Alumni House, I thanked the Huffakers for the opportunity to show them around UT. “My father loved this place, and what it did for him,” said Tom. “He said he would always make Tennessee proud, and I think that throughout his life he wanted to make sure that he did. We wanted to visit UT partly to say that our family has never forgotten what Tennessee did for my father, and we never will.”
After their visit the Huffakers made a gift to UT, matched by Tom’s employer, Exxon-Mobil, to go toward scholarships for entomology students.
TVA representatives join Etnier, Kalisz, and Ichthyology staff for photo before the reception.
Representatives from the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency announced the establishment of the Etnier Ichthyology Endowment at a reception on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus Thursday, December 14.
“TVA is proud to be partners with the University of Tennessee, and David Etnier has been a big part of that partnership for more than 50 years,” says Evan Crews, senior manager for Natural Resource Management at the Tennessee Valley Authority. “We are thankful for the opportunity to support the UT Etnier Ichthyology Collection. This facility is a vital resource for all of us who work to improve aquatic biodiversity and protect the aquatic life that thrives in the Tennessee River and its tributaries.”
TWRA representatives join Etnier, Kalisz, and Ichthyology staff for photo before the reception.
The endowment will provide support to continue the research conducted at the UT Etnier Ichthyology Collection, a facility used for undergraduate, graduate, and professional teaching and research. It also serves as a significant public resource.
“What started out to be a simple opportunity to celebrate the Tennessee Valley Authority’s generous donation to the Etnier Endowment quickly evolved into celebrating Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s generosity and that of so many others,” says Susan Kalisz, professor and head, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “Today we celebrate the incredible dedication of David Etnier to persevere through many trials and tribulations and to create an impressive group of advocates and partners over the past five decades while creating a world class Ichthyology Collection and program.”
The Etnier Ichthyology Collection has more than 500,000 fish specimens from all over the world and serves as a significant resource for the research community. Several specimens in the collection were significant for discovering new species. Other specimens help scientists study the impact of global warming and water quality on aquatic communities. For nearly 40 years, the collection has served as a repository and reference for private and governmental agencies working on the fishes of the Southeastern United States.
“As an agency, we are dedicated to protect, manage, conserve, and restore the natural resources in the state,” says Dave McKinney, chief, Environmental Services for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. “None of this would get done, however, without the collaboration between our agency, TVA, and Professor Etnier’s work at UT. We are truly lucky to have a great resource such as the Ichthyology Collection available to help us fulfill our mission.”
David Etnier began collecting fish for teaching and research on the fauna of Tennessee and surrounding states in the 1960s. Fifty years later, the UT Etnier Ichthyology Collection is the largest fish collection in the state of Tennessee and the third largest overall in the Southeastern United States.
“We have more than 320 fish species in East Tennessee alone,” says Etnier, professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “When I arrived on campus, 25 of those were undescribed. We had names and localities for the fish, but that’s about it, so I decided to write a book.”
His book, The Fishes of Tennessee, first published in 1993, is considered an authoritative source on the diversity of freshwater fauna in Tennessee. Throughout his career, Etnier taught graduate students how to identify, collect, and preserve hundreds of fish species.
One of the first projects involved studying river systems with unknown fish faunas. Etnier, graduate students, and TVA fisheries biologists travelled to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, which at that time was the primary repository for fishes from the entire Tennessee River system. Several of the Tennessee specimens, collected by TVA field crews from 1937 to 1943, were catalogued and available for examination. Many others, however, remained in their original collection jars, unsorted, and unidentified. Etnier and his team spent two weeks completing the identification of the specimens, which launched the close cooperation with fish specialists at TVA and UT that continues to this day.
More than 40 guests attended the Etnier Ichthyology Endowment reception.
As the event ended, Chris Cox, director of development in the College of Arts and Sciences, announced the Etnier Endowment Challenge.
“Professor Etnier’s vision is to grow the endowment to $100,000,” Cox says. “Today, that vision comes one step closer to becoming a reality with a matching challenge from David and his wife Liz. We ask you to be an advocate for the Etnier Ichthyology Collection and help us achieve the Etnier’s vision and be part of the legacy here in Tennessee.”
For more information about the collection, visit the Etnier Ichthyology Collection website.
In late November of 2016, a single spark started a fire on a mountain in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) that quickly became one of the largest natural disasters in the history of Tennessee. When it was finally over, the wildfires burned close to 18,000 acres in and around the Park, destroyed over 2,400 buildings, and claimed 14 lives. They were the most deadly and destructive wildfires in the Southeastern United States in 2016.
For faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the fires sparked unique opportunities for ecological research and discovery from fungi and soil microbes to plant communities and invasive ecology.
Fungi play two roles in the environment. They decompose organic matter and return nutrients to the soil. Fungi also have a symbiotic relationship with plants and provide them with essential minerals and water in exchange for sugar.
“Fungi are an understated, but essential part of the environment,” says Professor Karen Hughes, who is working with colleague Brandon Matheny and a team from the University of Illinois to understand why a completely new group of rapidly growing “fire-response” fungi are appearing.
Fires are rare in the Smokies, since 1934 when the National Park Service established the GSMNP, mainly due to a change in perception of fire and its role in ecosystem health. The high-intensity fires that raged through the Smokies destroyed most fungi in the fire zones, which gives Hughes and her team an opportunity to study new “fire-response” fungi which appear after the fires and if they are different from those in the Western United States where fires are more common.
“We are identifying fire-response fungi that may be ‘new to science’ and documenting other fungi that are enhanced rather than destroyed by fire,” Hughes says. “The health and recovery of the forest depends on fungi being restored to the soil. The normal processes of decomposition and symbiosis must be re-established if forests are to recover.”
The soil these fungi grow in is the focus of Jen Schweitzer’s research in the Smokies. With exploratory funding from the UT Office of Research, Schweitzer, an associate professor in EEB, Hughes, and other researchers from UT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering are examining soil properties and processes in sites ranging from non-burned areas to areas with low-, medium-, and high-intensity burns.
“Our research is focused on the dual impacts, together and in isolation, of the effects of fire and urbanization on soils, soil microbial communities, and soil-plant interactions,” Schweitzer says.
Fire and urbanization are two widespread disturbances that are increasing due to climate change and the growing number of people living in cities. Researchers, however, rarely have a chance to examine their effects together. The proximity of Gatlinburg to the Smokies provides Schweitzer and her team a unique opportunity to study the impacts. Most of what researchers understand about fire is based on studies in the arid Western United States, but the results will most likely differ from studies in the mesic areas of the Southeastern United States.
“An additional opportunity with these sites in the urban-wildland fire gradient is to examine the independent and combined roles of fire and urbanization as selective forces on plant evolution,” Schweitzer says. “There is almost no information about population-level evolutionary responses to these disturbance events. With increasing disturbance around the globe, understanding the long-term evolutionary consequences of fire on plants is critical.”
Understanding what happens to plant communities after a fire event is exactly what Mona Papeş is out to discover. Will the native plants be more successful or will there be more invasive plants in the burnt areas? It is a matter of adaptation and dispersal.
“The fires burned different areas with different intensity,” says Papeş, assistant professor in EEB. “The basic goal is to understand how fire affects plant communities in terms of number and abundance of species.”
In areas of high-intensity burns, the forest canopy changed from completely closed to completely open. This affects the amount of sunlight that reaches the forest floor, which in turn, affects the types of plant communities sprouting up after the fires. Papeş and her team are assessing and comparing the recovery of plant communities in the low-, mid-, and high-intensity areas to reference unburned sites, with the goal of documenting any shifts in the plant communities.
“We are interested in the number of plant species, as well as the abundance of species,” Papeş says. “This will allow us to forecast the trajectory of understory plant communities under different intensity fires in the future, which may or may not affect how we use fire as a forest management tool.”
The devastation of the fires still hangs in the air for many people who call the area around the Smokies home. If there is one lesson learned, it is that nature is resilient, and in the Park, it is making a comeback. Whether it will look the same in the future is still an unknown, but EEB researchers are rolling up their sleeves and digging in to find out.
One of the most important metrics when measuring the success of a department is external funding. Usually, this means looking at how much grant money faculty receive, but our EEB students have an excellent record in winning prestigious grants and fellowships. In fact, 25 percent of our graduate students are self-funded. Last academic year, 14 of our 56 graduate students brought in a total of over $300,000 in funding. The following are just a few examples:
Three EEB students won three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards:
Shelby Scott (Gross Lab) was awarded a three-year National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship.
Below is a sampling of articles from our EEB blog. We hope you enjoy reading about our fantastic students!
Derryberry (center, back) identifying songbirds during a workshop with middle-school students.
A songbird belting out its song – whether from the top of a tree in a forest or on a street corner downtown – is what motivates new Assistant Professor Elizabeth Derryberry’s research program.
“People always smile when I tell them my lab studies bird song and then immediately ask if I can identify this one bird that always wakes them up in the morning,” Derryberry says.
Apart from its general appeal to the public, bird song is a fascinating behavior with many parallels to human language.
“Many birds learn their song, just as children learn their words: from their parents,” Derryberry says. “A bird’s song has become an important model for how traits can change through mistakes and innovations made across generations – known as cultural evolution – not just genetic changes.”
Because cultural evolution can happen much more rapidly than genetic evolution, researchers use culturally evolving traits to measure rapid responses to environmental change. Derryberry does just that in her lab by examining how songs change in response to noise pollution, which is a global issue.
Over the past five years, she has studied the effects of noise pollution on song, using a common songbird that persists in the urban parks of San Francisco – the white-crowned sparrow. Her group finds that songs have increased in pitch and become narrower in their frequency range over the past 30 years. Birds hear these songs at greater distances in low-frequency urban noise. These changes come with a cost, however, as female sparrows prefer songs with a broader frequency range, most likely because such songs are more difficult to produce.
White-crowned sparrow male singing above the din in San Francisco
“One of the best parts of this project was that I had the opportunity to conduct an experiment to test whether cultural evolution really can explain these changes in song over time,” Derryberry says.
In her lab, she raised nearly 50 baby songbirds over two years in different noise environments and demonstrated that birds preferentially learned songs least masked by noise in their environment. Once they learned that song, however, they did not change it even when their noise environment changed.
“Let’s just say that feeding 50 baby birds every half hour dawn to dusk was good training for developing a work-life balance,” Derryberry says.
As her team worked in the field setting of urban San Francisco, heat waves were a serious issue. The fact that heat waves are increasing in frequency and magnitude across the globe has inspired a new line of research in Derryberry’s lab. Her team, along with former postdoc and collaborator Ray Danner at UNCW, is now studying how heat stress affects singing and mate choice behaviors in songbirds.
“Our initial findings are really exciting, and suggest both cognitive and motor impairment at temperatures experienced in current heat waves,” says Derryberry, who looks forward to pursuing these questions at UT as the research breadth and strength of the department promises many great collaborations.
By her senior year Hannah Anderson, an EEB major, had already been involved in several projects. She started in the Riechert Lab where she continues to maintain a large population of spiders under the guidance of graduate student Angela Chuang. Frequently left in charge of the lab in Angela’s absence, Hannah has been learning many of the more practical concerns required for maintaining a living population in a lab setting and the process of collecting living samples.
Hannah has also been involved in a project in the Simberloff Lab exploring the behavior of the native green anole and responses to the invasive brown anole. Though her time on this project was relatively brief, it provided invaluable knowledge regarding the study of animal behavior in a natural setting and the complications therein. The grant application process and protocol review by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) also gave Hannah additional experience.
Hannah did not stop there. In the fall of 2016, she took a Comparative Animal Behavior lab, where groups work together to create research projects. Though the class is over, Hannah has not let the project end. With the help of Professor Todd Freeberg, Hannah works directly with graduate student Johnathan “Alex” Grizzell and uses all of the experience she has gained up to this point to help design a field experiment exploring the behavioral responses of native birds to anthropogenic noise. During background research, Hannah noticed something odd in the scientific literature: though there had been many studies on the effects of anthropogenic noise on various organisms, most of them used modulated white noise as a replacement for anthropogenic noise. There were virtually no studies, except for one on frogs, that tested whether or not white noise was a suitable replacement for anthropogenic noise. Using a playback experiment, Hannah is attempting to prove that the two are not equivalent when it comes to Carolina chickadees and tufted titmice. Hannah intends to use her experience as a fully involved data gatherer and data coder for further research and to publish before she enters graduate school.