A professor of vertebrate zoology
The Wooster Salamander Squad recently had its second outing of the fall on Oct. 8th. Many secretive salamanders were found by young and old! Our next outing (and last of the fall) will be on Saturday November 5th (9am – noon). Please contact me (rlehtinen@wooster.edu) if you’d like to reserve a spot!
See http://www.wooster.edu/news/releases/2016/september/lehtinen-salamander/index.php for recent media coverage of our work!
In May of this year, I took three College of Wooster undergraduates to the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica to study frogs, snakes and lizards. April Arquilla (’17) did a field experiment on coral snake mimicry, Ben Grunwald (’17) studied lizards diversity in primary and secondary rainforests and Linnea Johnson (’17) studied glass frog diversity in primary and secondary rainforests. When not working with these fabulous students, I continued my studies of ecological niche use and parental care in glass frogs. We ate great food, made great friends, saw a lot of incredible wildlife and worked hard in the jungle to get our data. Hope to go down again next summer!
The very first group of intrepid salamander biologists went out to Wooster Memorial Park on Saturday, September 17th. It rained much of the early morning hours but then let up as we went out into the woods. The wet weather definitely helped bring out our quarry. Squad members young and old caught and marveled at slimy, red-backed and two-lined salamanders as well as a super cute little ring neck snake.
If you missed it, our next outing is Saturday October 8th, 2016 from 9-noon. Please contact me (rlehtinen@wooster.edu) if you’d like to reserve a spot!
I was happy to be able to attend the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists this year, which met recently in New Orleans. With co-author Erin Hodson (’14) I gave a talk entitled “Decline of an adaptation in a coral snake mimic” based on our recent work on this topic. I also gave a poster with co-authors Stephanie Andrus (’12), L. Fawcett (’14) and A. Vanko (’12) entitled “Something old and something new: Factors influencing coloration patterns in the Bloody Bay Poison frog (Mannophryne olmonae, Aromobatidae)”.
Hadn’t been to this meeting is a few years, was good to see old and new friends and hear some great science!
Late last year, Jacob Beckstead (’16) and I got some squirrel nest boxes set up on the College of Wooster campus. These nest boxes are equipped with web cams that allow us to peak in on the squirrels activities whenever we want to. All three nest boxes are currently being used and for the College of Wooster community they can be publicly viewed at this link: Wooster Squirrel Nest Box Cams. We hope to make it available online from anywhere in the near future. Enjoy!