Back From The Gulf Coast

I just got back from a Gulf Coast five day trip, visiting the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, and going on to New Orleans. The Program Committee meeting at the Sea Lab was more interesting than usual because the place is growing. Two new faculty members and a new Executive Director will be in place by September. There will also now be the possibility for lecture courses by Sea Lab faculty to be simulcast for graduate students at other Alabama institutions to view for course credit. These courses would include subjects we can't offer such as geochemistry and benthic ecology. Not all of my students at UAH would benefit from this, but some would. I'll have to work on arranging this with our Graduate Studies dean.

Ruth and I were able to go to a crawfish boil thrown by the Sea Lab late Friday afternoon. Several senior faculty members actually did the boil off of a pickup truck behind the new Marine Sciences building, and some graduate students sold their left-over beer for fifty cents a can (I'm not sure what it was left-over from...). About 75 people were there on a beautiful early summer afternoon. This is the kind of activity that UAH really needs, to bring together a variety of people at a fun social event. The only funny thing was observing how many grad students had goofy tattoos. Maybe I'm a conservative in my old age, but before you get a tattoo think about it for more than 30 seconds, fer chrissakes.

New Orleans was just for fun, hanging out buying trinkets, eating well, and drinking beer in the street (legally!). The Quarter has several good used book stores and I bought two relevant books: Females of the Species by Maryann Kevles from twenty years ago, and Floods, Famines and Emperors by Brian Fagan. Fagan's book seems to be similar to the now-famous Jared Diamond book about the collapse of human societies from environmental damage, and Kevles' book is a good introduction to the concept of female choice being key in the evolutionary process of sexual selection. Much of my Vertebrate Reproduction course works this concept, and I might hand out a photocopied chapter of Kevles' book as a good, broad introduction to the subject. I almost bought a pristine condition copy of the book Fishes of the Northern Gulf of Mexico, still with its ID wall chart, but $50 seemed to be a little steep. Used copies can be had through Amazon's network for as little as $4 plus shipping which is what I think I'll do.