Y'all are going to think that I am obsessed with Up Goer 5-ing everything, but I am at it again! The summer is drawing to a close and we are welcoming three awesome new people to the Perry Lab group this fall: Biology graduate student Cory Henderson (previously mentioned), Anthropology graduate student Maggie Hernandez, and post-doc Katie Grogan. We've also experienced outflow: a few undergraduate scholars have graduated, and Richard Bankoff will be roaming around Madagascar till late next spring. All of these moving parts made us feel that it would be a good idea to reintroduce our individual projects to the lab group. What better way to do that than by limiting your vocabulary and time to present your subject matter?! Elevator pitches are all fine and dandy, but we wanted to have some fun with this :)
This week's blog post is my two-minute summary of my dissertation research. I'll be presenting these slides during our lab meeting next week as an example for everyone else (they'll be presenting theirs August 28th but I'll be traveling then. Look for an update on that next week!). You may find quite a bit of my material is rather familiar... Let me know what you think! Cheers :)
Humans have been around for at least ten hundred hundred years, which is not a very long time when you consider the age of our world. Yet in this small bit of time, humans have become very good at changing the world and the not-human lives around them in all kinds of ways. Sure, humans meant to change some of the animals and green growing things to have more food around, but we are only just realizing how many other animals and green growing things have changed too.
People who study life have noticed that as humans catch and eat the larger-bodied animals, sometimes only the smaller ones are left to make babies and over time all the animal bodies get smaller. These are some of the animals and green growing things that have been getting smaller over time because of humans catching and eating them.
I wanted to find out if this getting smaller thing might be happening in the jumping tree animals that live in the number four-biggest land-surrounded-by-water. I went to this area to see if the long, hard white arm and leg things from animals that lived a long time ago are bigger than the ones from today from the same place.
I brought this picture-taking thing with me to take hundreds of pictures of each of the hard white things that were found on the ground after the animals died. From these pictures and numbers, it seems like the jumping tree animals from a long time ago were maybe a bit bigger than the ones that live in this area today. Maybe this means that humans might have been trying to catch and eat the biggest animals in the groups, but we are not yet sure.
In another part of the world closer to us, there is a water animal that carries its house with it that we know has gotten a lot smaller over time because of humans catching and eating it. I will go to that part of the world next week so that I can bring back some bits of these animals and their houses. I will use these bits to see if the little letters that make animals what they are have also changed over time along with their getting-smaller bodies.
Humans also make changes to the world without meaning to and bring animals and green-growing things to places where they would not usually live. Humans brought very tiny biting pack animals to the place where we live almost one hundred years ago, and these very tiny biting pack animals have caused lots of changes to their new home. They seem to have even caused small cold-blood ground animals to grow longer legs so that they can shake the very tiny biting animals off and avoid being eaten. I will use bits of skin and stuff to see if the little letters that make animals what they are have also changed over time along with their getting-longer legs.