Fun At ASB

We just got home from the ASB meeting in Birmingham, a 27 hour trip with thrills and chills. The chills part was leaving yesterday as a heavy band of thunderstorms approached Alabama from Mississippi and closed in on I-65, our route to B'ham. South of Huntsville, on a secondary highway, we went through a near white-out of heavy rain and pulled over for a few minutes. Then we raced on as the rain subsided, and got on to 65. We heard on the radio that a tornadic storm was forming and running through the area we had just driven through. And, we listened to descriptions of storms running through the Huntsville area; luckily the worst ones missed our house, and also missed the UAH campus.

Once we survived and got to ASB, things went well. My talk this morning on telescope shiner reproductive biology was the first one I've done at a conference that I finished gracefully within 15 minutes, and had time for a question. I said just about everything I meant to say, and avoided any random faux pas. Two other talks in the Herpetology/Ichthyology session were interesting; Michael Sandel from Tuscaloosa presented part of his dissertation work on pygmy sunfish species distribution and population structure as a likely result of the waxing and waning of glacial cycles that affected sea level along the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts. And Josh Turner from Jacksonville State University in AL gave a presentation on the current status of the holiday darter in AL; in short, the species is found in several stretches of Shoal Creek in the Talladega National Forest in Cleburne County, and those stretches are cut off from each other by small reservoirs that fishes can't traverse, certainly not upstream. The Forest Service is aware of the situation, but is probably unable to break down more than one of the three reservoirs in this chain. The species is also found in Georgia, but isn't exactly common. It's a variation of what we've found with the stippled studfish in the Tallapoosa River system, not a big surprise unfortunately.

This afternoon there was a Symposium on Darwin, observing his 200th birth year. Several good speakers were part of it, including Andrew Berry from Harvard who has a wonderfully sick British sense of humor and talked about the possible replicability of evolution if "the tape of history was rewound", as Stephen Jay Gould put it. But the capstone was E.O. Wilson ("Ed" to his pals), speaking on his 80th birthday today. I hadn't seen him for years, and he was good (and frailer looking). He spoke largely on how bad the biodiversity crisis is becoming, as most people care about saving the physical environment but not the biosphere. He urged students to study nematode worms or fungus, because both groups, as examples, are hugely understudied and anything you find out about them is new; both groups probably include millions of as-yet undescribed species. His best description was of the human condition: we have stone-age emotions, with medieval institutions, and God-like technology, all in all a dangerous condition.

It was good to get out and see some people I haven't seen for a while, and hear about various research projects. And that's what's good about going to scientific mettings!