First day at the Gault Nature Reserve on Monday: setting up camera traps and dragging for ticks, in good company (Strix varia and Trillium grandiflorum)

A very nice piece written by Etienne Plamondon Emond for Québec Science here.

​« On est vraiment dans l’inconnu. Un tel cocktail ne s’est jamais produit. On ne peut pas se référer à la librairie de fossiles » pour envisager l’avenir.

Kudos to Kelsey who made it in the McGil Reporter! Kelsey received a Graduate Mobility Award to travel to Panama and collect her field data in the Winter 2023. Her MSc research would not have been possible without this award

Shout-out to Anthony Howell, the curator in charge of the collections at the Redpath Museum. I donated to the Redpath Museum my entire collection of voucher specimens; over 3,000 specimens of small mammals we collected in my lab across all of Quebec since 2008! There's Jonathan Diamond's beavers in the lot too, some of those coming all the way from Nunavut. Each specimen is preserved as skeletal material (skull) and tissue samples stored in massive -80C freezers. This is a unique collection; I do not think there is anything like that anywhere else in the world. Fifteen years of sampling documenting evolution in action! Anthony organized it all and this collection is now available for study to the rest of the research community.   

Just published by Jonathan Diamond! The beaver is shifting its distribution North, and as it goes, is adapting to new forage type. 

Kirsten defended brilliantly her PhD thesis and received incredible feedback and encouragements from her committee. Two papers published and another two in revision, it's a wrap!

Kirsten joined my lab 8 years ago for an independent studies, and landed a job in the one place where she will be able to share her expertise and apply her knowledge in the most meaningful way at the INSPQ. I am very proud.

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I have been working for 2 years to prepare this program on Sustainable development in the Caribbean. We have a group of students from McGill and the Cave Hill campus of the University of West Indies and have a full schedule for the Fall semester. First lectures today, but also some time to get familiar with the local surroundings.

I am very proud of this work which we just published in the journal Scientific Reports.

This paper was long due and summarize the work we have been doing in my lab over the past decade on the emergence of Lyme disease in Quebec. We used our field data to illustrate the dynamics of the LD system, and how the mechanisms driving the prevalence of the pathogen in the ecosystem are distinct depending on the stage of emergence of the disease. LD has only recently begun to emerge in Quebec, while it has long been established south of the border. One can simply not apply the rules of one part of the world to another region. We have had the opportunity to observe in real time the spread of this disease in Quebec, from the early detection until its establishment in the southern regions. This work is important if we are to forecast the pattern and rate of expansion of the disease and future risk under climate warming.

A second paper out last week which means a lot to me.

Kirsten published the manuscript from her MSc research on size variation in mammals, and show how, well, variable it is. Is there any rule? Can we use the present to predict the future response of mammals species to climate warming? I was a strong advocate of this ever since graduate school, and Link and I published a review on this 15 years ago in the journal Ecology Letters. We are back this time with a large dataset Kirsten collected from museum collections for 17 species in North America. The more we look into it, the more exceptions to the rules we find. Van Valen in 1973 wrote that "we do not understand why mammals have the size they do". I should have listened better!