Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I missed posting on the other recent days of note like Pi day (March 14 or 3.14) and The Ides of March. So, we take on St. Pat’s. This is the day the Sons of Erin, and those that wish they were, celebrate their Irish ancestry. By turning an Irish religious day into a drunken party. We on the other hand are just having a nice family dinner of corned beef and cabbage. I’ll be the only one drinking Guinness and just one of them.
Spring seems to be coming, although you wouldn’t guess it by today’s weather. We’re seeing the birds change from their drab Winter plumage into Spring mating plumage. And they’re much more vocal too. We’ve had a flock of over 15 turkeys just on the other side of our fence all winter. We throw corn and sunflower seed over the fence to feed them. The past couple weeks the males have been strutting their stuff while the females ignore them and eat the seed. I bought a photo blind to try and get some pictures but the person owning the field started clearing out brush. We’ve only seen the turkeys occasionally since he started clearing. To make life interesting for our feeder birds, a bird-eating Cooper’s hawk has started staking out our deck. Seed consumption really drops with him on sentry duty.
Immature Cooper’s hawk staking out our bird feeders. Taken through a window screen.
Next week Molly defends her PhD at Temple. We are going back for the defense and most of my siblings are also coming. Mitchell’s family is coming too. In a testimony to how well-liked Molly is, she has people coming from Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and South Carolina. I was very pleasantly surprised when my siblings all said they wanted to come. Defending a PhD thesis is not in our family history. Her committee will not even think of rejecting her thesis when they see that crowd. I don’t think physical desecration of them, or the Temple campus, would be out of the question Think Philly sports fans. Philly may need to grease the lamp poles on Broad Street when she passes.
Molly’s research consisted of performing genetic analysis on Caribbean lizards. Her work has resulted in the delineation of 18 new species. Her thesis is over 800 pages. Einstein’s PhD thesis was 24 pages.
For your reading pleasure I have included the abstract from here thesis.
Title: Evolution, systematics, biogeography, and conservation of Neotropical forest lizards
Abstract: Research on island biodiversity has played an integral part in our understanding of speciation, biogeography, and adaptive radiations. The islands of the Caribbean provide an ideal location to study evolutionary hypotheses because of their proximity to species-rich mainland source areas while being sufficiently isolated to preserve an endemic biota. Most of the more than 1,000 Caribbean reptile and amphibian species occur nowhere else and are typically restricted to a single island. However, anthropogenic pressures resulting in habitat loss and degradation threaten biodiversity, leading to the loss of undescribed and unstudied species. Few studies have been conducted on the phylogenetic relationships and biogeography of Neotropical forest lizards (Diploglossidae) because of the rarity of most species. Before my work, there were 3 recognized genera and 53 species of these lizards, found in Middle America, South America, and on Caribbean islands. I gathered and analyzed sequence DNA of 3,232 genes and 642,775 aligned base pairs in 30 currently recognized diploglossid species and conducted phylogenetic, phylogenomic, biogeographic, ecological, and morphological analyses. I found that Neotropical forest lizards are older and more species-rich than previously thought. Based on this, I described 2 new subfamilies, 4 new genera, and 18 new species. I also resurrected four genera and elevated 17 subspecies to the species level. The family Diploglossidae now contains three subfamilies, 12 genera, and 91 species. I assigned all 59 Caribbean celestine species to IUCN Redlist threat classes, with the primary threats being habitat loss and introduced predators. Of these, fifteen (25%) are Critically Endangered, seventeen (29%) are Endangered, one (2%) is Vulnerable, and twenty-six (44%) are Least Concern. Four of the Critically Endangered species are extinct, or possibly extinct. My biogeographic analyses indicate that forest lizards reached the Caribbean islands by at least two dispersal events, in the Oligocene and Miocene, likely by floating on flotsam from northern South America. Past and present ocean currents facilitated these initial dispersal events and subsequent dispersals among Caribbean islands. Finally, I assigned the species of Neotropical forest lizards to six different ecomorph classes based on ecology, morphology, and statistical analyses. Several of these ecomorphs appear multiple times in my phylogeny, indicating that convergent evolution has occurred within the family.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 