Team Gambusia alumni Rachel graduated this spring and has been hired by Pacific EcoRisk! Excellent work in the lab this past year, and best of luck in your future career!
Field Work 2017
The major goal of my postdoctoral fellowship project is investigating the impacts of human induced rapid environmental changes (HIREC) on natural selection in wild populations. To do so, I’m comparing modern populations of western mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) to historical populations of fish collected at these same sites. These sites are unique from one another in the extent to which they’ve been influenced by human impacts they’ve faced.
Thus far, I’ve collected fish at each site twice, first in the spring, and again this summer. At each site, my amazing team and I caught fish, photographed them for morphometric analysis, and collected tissue samples from a subset of them for future molecular analysis (look for more info on that in future post!).
In the spring, we were delayed due to near-record rainfall we received this year in California. At one site, we literally couldn’t get within miles of the collection site because of flooded roadways. Eventually, the water receded enough that we could catch the fish in the parking lot at the site.
In spite of the amount of rain winter brought, it was a typical California summer and on our second visit to sites we were working in mid to high 90 degree heat. Finding fish was much easier however, and we only had to return to one site for a second day.
We’re looking forward to seeing and sharing the results of this work!
The Ligocki Lab 