MeaseyLab welcomes Jennica Poongavanan

At our lab meeting on Thursday we were delighted to welcome Jennica Poongavanan to the extended MeaseyLab students.

Jennica started her MSc with Res Altwegg and Ian Durbach at the University of Cape Town's Department of Statistical Science. Jennica will be part of the SEEC group and will be co-supervised by John at CIB. Jennica's project is to take the density data generated by Marike Louw and the volunteers doing aSCR on the Cape peninsula this year, and turn them into Species Distribution Models. 

British Ecological Society (BES) bulletin covers work of CIB

The work of the Centre for Invasion Biology was covered in the British Ecological Society's bulletin this month. 

This included the fabled win by Marike Louw in South Africa's Young SCience Communicator's Competition for her article on aSCR. See the blog post here and what the BES said about it below:

Nitya presents a poster at Island Invasives Conference

PhD student Nitya Mohanty presents a poster on his work on invasive species of the Andaman Islands at the Island Invasives Conference 2017, Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee, Scotland. Nitya's work was well received with many envious of his idilic island field site in the Bay of Bengal. 

Pretoria falls silent to hear Marike's peninsula moss frog.

MSc student, Marike Louw, presented her aSCR work to an eager audience at the Zoological Society of Southern Africa's (ZSSA) meeting at CSIR Pretoria, South Africa. 

In this eagerly anticipated talk, Marike layed out her latest findings in the National Geographic sponsored project. 

Also at the ZSSA, Alex Rebelo presented his MSc work on the pyxicephalid radiation. 

Marike Louw, Res Altwegg, Andrew Turner, Jasper Slingsby, Ben Stevenson, David Borchers, & John Measey Densities of Arthroleptella lightfooti across the Cape Peninsula: preliminary results from acoustic spatial capture-recapture. 2017 Combined Congress of the Entomological and Zoological Societies of Southern Africa CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa

Alex Rebelo & John Measey Frog Olympics: exploring the locomotor ecomorphology of the pyxicephalid radiation in southern Africa. 2017 Combined Congress of the Entomological and Zoological Societies of Southern Africa CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa

Congratulations to Nick (aka Wei Cheng Tan) on the submission of his thesis!

You may remember that some time back (it was 12 January 2017) we welcomed Nick to the MeaseyLab from Université de Poitiers to conduct his thesis work on South African agamas. Nick went back and worked very hard on the write up, finally submitting his thesis entitled: Is the radiation of South African agamids adaptive?

The thesis was supervised by Anthony Herrel, Didier Bouchon and John Measey. It makes great reading, and we really look forward to seeing the papers in press!

Fantastic work, Nick!

Here's a video showing how Nick did the performance work. To see more videos, subscribe to our channel.