The center is private, non-profit research organization based in Provincetown, MA.  The successful candidate will play an integral role in the rapid assessment and reporting of habitat characteristics that influence right whale distribution in Cape Cod Bay.

This job will involve extensive time at sea during winter months, conducting zooplankton sampling, right whale behavioral studies and photo-ID, microscopic identification and enumeration of zooplankton samples, and database management/data entry.

Additional duties include general laboratory maintenance, data analysis and summarization, report preparation, and may involve participation in ongoing interdisciplinary research programs at PCCS.  The successful candidate in this position will also be responsible for the training and supervision of seasonal research assistants.

Is this the perfect job for you?  Read on for the qualifications…

Candidates must have an M.S. in marine biology or related field, and have completed at least one year of applicable experience. Should be highly motivated, independent, and posses strong attention to detail.  Familiarity with the identification of Gulf of Maine zooplankton species is highly preferable, but not required.  Experience with Microsoft Access and biological oceanography software/data management techniques are preferred.  Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously, coordinate technical activities, and prioritize work loads within an independent work group is essential.

Compensation commensurate with qualifications and experience. This position is funded for eight months only; extension is possible based on review and funding.

If you’re interested in applying for this position, please submit a cover letter, resume and references no later than October 4 to:

Stephanie Richardson, Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies

115 Bradford Street

Provincetown, MA 02657

srichardson@coastalstudies.org

Just what is a food signalling call?

It’s any vocalization or behavior that serves to communicate to others that a food source has been found…and if you’re a hungry human or any other animal, you’ve got to decide carefully with whom you’d like to share it.

As humans, we’re not likely to send out a food-sharing call to just anyone who happens to be within ear shot.  If we’ve found something great, chances are we’re only interested in sharing with ‘socially important individuals’, people with whom we are closely associated.  After all, if you do something nice for members of your immediate social group, it strengthens the group bond and should translate into some reciprocal assistance at a later time.  Reminiscent of those cliques you experienced in high school, there is also a form of social rejection of non-members.  If you’re not a part of the club, you aren’t invited to take part in the ‘members only’ benefits…whatever they may be.

It turns out that in wild chimpanzees the same logic applies.  Males form stable, long-term social relationships with other males that are extremely important for day to day functions like group defense, territory establishment and social grooming.  Over six hundred hours of behavioral observations of these animals in Ugandan tropical forests confirmed that males sometimes produce special ‘rough grunt’ food calls about the quality of a food source.  However, they ONLY produce those calls if another ‘socially important’ male is nearby.  If the audience consistsof lower ranking individuals or even of oestrous (reproductive) females, males do not produce any rough grunt vocalizations.

There you have it:  Social cliques and old boys clubs are alive and well in primate orders other than our own!

Cited: Slocombe, K. E. et al.  June, 2010. Production of food-associated calls in wild male chimpanzees is dependent on the composition of the audience. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol.

I’m so happy for both of them, they are uniquely talented and doing amazing, wonderful work!

Jamie’s campaign is still active for a few more weeks, please support him in his efforts

MUN is located in St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador which is a quiet, beautiful city on the Atlantic Ocean.

For more information contact Dr. Karem Azmy, Associate Professor: kazmy@mun.ca.

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The Nature Publishing Group is looking to hire two associate editors for Nature Climate Change

Nature Climate Change is looking for two Associate Editors to join its London-based team. The international monthly journal, which launches in April 2011, aims to be the world’s leading journal on the impacts and implications of global climate change for society, policy, the economy and the world at large.

Nature Climate Change will publish original research across the natural and social sciences and will strive to forge and synthesize interdisciplinary research. In addition to publishing the very best in climate research, Nature Climate Change will provide a platform for opinion and analysis from leading academics, as well as original investigative reporting from renowned science journalists

They are looking for two Associate Editors – one with expertise in physical climate science and one with expertise in social science research – to develop, launch and establish Nature Climate Change as the essential publication covering research on the Earth’s changing climate. These roles will primarily involve evaluating original research articles for suitability for publication in Nature Climate Change. The roles will also involve writing content for the journal, commissioning and editing content from academics, liaising with the academic community and developing fruitful relations with authors.

Ideal candidates will have a PhD or equivalent in a climate-related discipline and have demonstrable research achievements. Although postdoctoral experience is preferred (not required), emphasis will be placed on broadly trained applicants with knowledge of the wider research community. These are demanding and extremely stimulating roles, which call for a keen interest in the practice and communication of science. The successful candidates will therefore be dynamic, motivated and outgoing, and must possess excellent time management, presentation and interpersonal skills.

Closing date: Friday 10^th September 2010

Application is by CV and covering letter detailing your salary expectations as well as explaining your interest in the post to the Chief Editor, Dr Olive Heffernan at o.heffernan@nature.com. Please quote reference number NPG 034/10 in the subject header.

Vomit, Puke, Coughing Cubes

…whatever you call it, September’s installment of the Carnal Carnival is all about losing your cookies!

Heave ho friends!  Send your regurgitation posts my way via email: carin at carinbondar dot com or carnalcarnival at gmail dot com or via a DM on twitter @DrBondar. The posts will be up-chucked on the third Friday in September!

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If you’ve come here for the first time in search of the fabulous EMJ, please feel free to stay a while and browse through some of the other posts on my blog.

Life History, Genetic Relatedness, and the Evolution of Menopause

Hadza grandmother and grandchild from Northern Tanzania / Source

Imagine you’re on the Serengeti Plateau and your children are hungry. For miles in every direction there’s nothing but dry scrub grass with the occasional flat-topped acacia tree marking the landscape. Your oldest has found a spot to dig for tubers but he and your daughter aren’t strong enough to scrape away the hard, baked earth by themselves. Your husband is tracking a wounded gazelle and could be gone for days. Meanwhile, the infant slung to your hip has started screaming and the distinctive sound triggers a release of oxytocin that causes your breasts to swell and leak. You have to feed her but you can’t do that and make sure your other children get enough to eat. There’s a very real chance that some of them will be too weak to survive the next time fever breaks out unless you can get help. You simply can’t be everywhere at once. It’s a desperate feeling but these are the daily realities among the East African Hadza. If it wasn’t for your mother, already kneeled on the ground and using a stick to claw through several layers of tough sediment, it might have been your reality as well. While your baby makes soft cooing sounds as she suckles you can only feel grateful that you were the youngest child in your family, or else your mother might well have had an infant of her own to care for.

This scenario provides the backdrop behind a perplexing question about human evolution: the advent of female reproductive senescence. Between the ages of 45-50 all women undergo physiological changes commonly known as menopause that result in the cessation of ovarian function. Since most women live longer than 50, even in preindustrial and hunter-gatherer societies, this raises a profound evolutionary question: Why would a species “choose” to forego one-third (and sometimes as much as one-half) of their reproductive potential? As I’ve discussed previously, the leading explanation has become known as the “grandmother hypothesis.”

The grandmother hypothesis posits that women who stopped ovulating in their golden years were freed from the costs of reproduction and were better able to invest in their existing children and grandchildren, thus helping to ensure that more individuals with their menopause inducing genes thrived and had children themselves.

To understand why humans are unique in this regards we must first examine what happens in nonhuman animals. All species make tradeoffs between reproductive and somatic investment. An individual animal is considered to have high reproductive fitness if they leave more offspring than others in their population. But if an individual focuses exclusively on reproduction (perhaps because of a mutation that causes a novel behavioral trait) and therefore doesn’t invest in their physical health and growth, chances are they won’t live long enough to achieve high fitness. Their genes will not be well represented in the next generation and the behavioral trait overemphasizing reproduction will be discarded into the waste-bin of evolutionary history. While there are a few excellent examples of species adapted for this kind of reproduction-heavy focus (such as the male wasp spiders who offer themselves up as a meal to their hungry mate), the preferred strategy in most species is to invest in both reproductive and somatic interests. To put this in economic terms, it’s of little use to keep up on your car payment if that means you’ll fall behind on your mortgage and end up on the streets.

Chimpanzee (left) and human (right) life history and reproductive senescence.
Yellow bars: juvenile years, green bars: childbearing years, purple bars: post-fertile years.
Figure reproduced from Hawkes (2010) using data from Hadza hunter-gatherers.

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Chimpanzees are a useful comparison since, along with bonobos, they’re our closest evolutionary relatives and we shared a common ancestor with them between 4 and 6 million years ago. As Kristen Hawkes reported in the May 11, 2010 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, chimpanzees undergo reproductive senescence between the years of 45 and 50 just like humans do. However, that’s also the extent of their lifespan. As the above figure highlights, humans have a longer lifespan than chimpanzees but made a different life history tradeoff to spend several nonreproductive decades during their golden years. One possibility to explain this could be that our hominin ancestors simply adapted to have a longer life after our two lineages diverged. However, this doesn’t address why human fecundity wasn’t extended as well. Natural selection is a reproductive fitness engine, if humans are the only species that have such a lengthy period of nonreproductive life it suggests there must be another factor involved that compensates for this gap.

This is where the grandmother hypothesis comes in. Multiple studies have suggested that it’s the maternal grandmother’s assistance that is the most important. This is because, infidelity being what it is, grandmothers are more confident in their genetic relatedness to a daughter’s child than to a son’s. However, as it turns out, not all grandchildren are created equal and this can have a profound influence on how both maternal and paternal grandmothers offer their assistance. As reported in the February 10, 2010 edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society, Cambridge biological anthropologist Molly Fox and colleagues show that, because of the way the X-chromosome is inherited by male and female offspring, grandmothers are more closely related to some grandchildren than others.

The X-chromosome contains an estimated 1,529 genes which translates to roughly 8% of the total number of genes that humans have. During reproduction, paternal grandmothers will pass one of their X-chromosomes to her son (the Y-chromosome, of course, being supplied from the paternal grandfather). If her son then has a daughter he will pass on this same X-chromosome because it’s the only one he has. This means that 50% of a paternal grandmother’s X-chromosomal genes will be represented in her granddaughter (see figure below). But, if she instead has a grandson, none of her X-chromosomal genes will be passed on because her son will only pass on the Y-chromosome. Paternal grandmothers will therefore share more genes overall with granddaughters than with grandsons (the authors calculate an overall genetic relatedness of 31% with granddaughters but only 23% with grandsons).

Maternal grandmothers have a somewhat different genetic relationship with their grandchildren. They will also pass along one X-chromosome to their daughter but both granddaughters and grandsons will have a 50:50 chance that this same chromosome will be passed to them in turn. This means that maternal grandmothers share about 25% of their overall genes with grandsons and granddaughters equally. While this genetic variability may not seem very significant in the abstract, it could have very real implications for child survival.

X-Chromosome relatedness between grandmothers and grandchildren. Maternal grandmothers (MGM) share 25% X-relatedness with both boys and girls while paternal grandmothers (PGM) share 0% X-relatedness with boys and 50% with girls. Figure reproduced from Fox et al. (2010).

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If the grandmother hypothesis is correct we should expect to find that those children who receive grandmother assistance will have survival rates consistent with this genetic variability. The authors therefore make the bold prediction that boys will survive better when receiving investment from maternal grandmothers while girls will survive better with investment from paternal grandmothers. To test this prediction the authors used data on child survival rates in the presence of grandmothers for seven populations of rural farmers separated in both geography and time: Japan (1671-1871), Germany (1720-1874), England (1770-1790), Ethiopia (1998-2003), Gambia (1950-1975), Malawi (1994-1997), and Canada (1680-1750). All of these populations lived without the benefits of modern scientific medical care and in an environment where a grandmother’s assistance could play an important role in child survival.

The results of this study matched the predictions beautifully. In all seven populations grandsons survived better in the presence of maternal rather than paternal grandmothers (p = 0.0081) while granddaughters survived better in six of the seven populations when they received assistance from paternal instead of maternal grandmothers (p = 0.0046). Culture certainly plays a role in how grandmothers interact with their grandchildren but, because these results were found in such diverse populations, it makes a strong argument that fitness benefits were the ultimate cause of these differences in grandmother investment. It also provides further support for the hypothesis that menopause is an evolutionary adaptation that allowed women to pass on more of their genes by helping their children have greater fitness instead of reproducing themselves.

It’s important to point out, however, that this doesn’t mean that all maternal grandmothers will prefer grandsons to granddaughters (or the opposite on the paternal side). There is never a one-to-one correspondence between statistical probabilities and everyday experience. However, on average, the general trend for Homo sapiens is to follow the same evolutionary forces that exist for any other species. Those traits that allowed more of an individuals genes to be passed on to the next generation were selected for and those that didn’t were ultimately discarded. The evidence has been steadily advancing that menopause is not simply the result of women living longer than their chimpanzee counterparts but that it was an evolutionarily successful strategy that allowed more members of our species to survive and reproduce.

When living on the African savanna a grandmother’s assistance can literally be a matter of life or death. For several million years our ancestors lived an experience very much like the Hadza today and the struggles they faced have left their mark inscribed on our bodies. Those who are about to experience the hot flashes and emotional ups and downs that come with the physiological changes of menopause may take solace in the fact that their present discomfort is the very thing that helped our distant relatives survive. If it wasn’t for the cessation of reproductive function our ancestors would have likely seen many more of their children and grandchildren face a bitter end. Thanks to the assistance of grandmothers our species has thrived to the point where many of us now no longer need their help. We owe them a debt of gratitude (and, at the very least, periodic phone calls to thank them for everything they’ve done for us, even if they’re not really sure why).

References:

Hawkes, K. (2010). How grandmother effects plus individual variation in frailty shape fertility and mortality: Guidance from human-chimpanzee comparisons Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (Supp. 2), 8977-8984 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914627107

Fox, M., Sear, R., Beise, J., Ragsdale, G., Voland, E., & Knapp, L. (2010). Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277 (1681), 567-573 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1660

Dr. Leys is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, and is one of the world’s foremost experts on one of the world’s most ancient Phyla: the Poriferans.

CB: Describe your research interests in a nutshell (think filbert rather than brazil).

SL: I’m interested in how animals sense and respond to the environment (in air or in water) and how the mechanisms to do this came about (in evolution). I assume that the ability to do this efficiently would have enhanced the success of the first animals, and therefore led to the evolution of more complex systems (sensory, neuronal, tissues, and body structures). This really boils down to the question of how sensory cells and nerves evolve. I study how animals coordinate behaviour without nerves, in order to evaluate (try to determine) whether these mechanisms formed the basis upon which the nervous system arose.

CB: You work primarily with sponges as a model system.  What are your main reasons for doing so?

SL: Sponges are the only animal group that lacks nerves or muscle. They are able to coordinate and to move (very slowly) but they never went down the path to nerves and rapid movement. Therefore sponges can help us understand how cells communicate when nerves are absent (for example in the case of diseases that attack the nervous system, or where nerves have been damaged, or even simply in the glial cells of the brain, which communicate by calcium signals). Sponges are also considered the most ancient phylum (Porifera), and the sponge body plan is not thought to have changed much in the last 800 million years. Therefore from studying modern sponges we can hope to understand what building blocks were present in the earliest animals.

But really, Sponges are cool.

There are no ‘rules’ to being a sponge. I just saw some photos of deep sea sponges that were like large baseball mitts perched up on a thick smooth stalk that looked like it was made of yellow plastic tubing; another was a simple white stalk with a perfectly symmetrical crown of spikes at the top (that one was carnivorous!). Sponges can filter bacteria, and can capture and eat shrimp; they can live in deep oceans and in shallow rivers and lakes, and even in sand dunes! They offer homes to so many other invertebrate and fish, and they’re extremely colourful. They are simply irresistible to work with.

CB: It always annoys me when people state that Cnidarians don’t have brains.  Your work on coordinated movement in sponges surely demonstrates that they have some kind of nervous system doesn’t it?  What are your thoughts on this?

SL: Well, first…I would agree that cnidarians don’t have brains as such, in the way that we usually understand a brain — a complex structure of neurons and supporting cells localized in one spot. Perhaps that concept of a brain is overrated. Cnidarians have complicated nervous systems but usually it is more spread out to reflect the fact that many cnidarians receive signals from 360 degrees, and therefore coordination is via a network of neurons that allow the animal to respond to stimuli at any point in a coordinated way. Poke a jellyfish and it knows which side you’re poking it on, and (depending on the type) will jet away in the opposite direction.

However, you don’t need nerves to have coordinated movement. The Venus fly trap and Mimosa plants close their petals and drop their leaves to trap a fly or expose thorns to predators, and they don’t have nerves. Rapid movement needs electrical signaling (an action potential) which requires a conduit that electrical current can rapidly travel down. All that is really needed is a fluid connection between cells, and in the plant a chloride potential travels quickly through the plasmodesmata (connections between cells) to all parts of the plant.

Sponges are animals that don’t have nerves, but some of them do use action potentials (electrical signaling) to coordinate arrests of pumping. Sponges make a living by pumping water through tiny canals and a fine filter to capture bacteria and other small food particles, and to get oxygen and excrete wastes.

Only one group of sponges (glass sponges) can stop their pumping instantly, and they probably do this to prevent clogging the filter when the water is really full of sediment. Glass sponges (hexactinellids) can do this because their tissue consists of a giant single cell, and therefore electrical signals can travel through the cytoplasm of the entire animal without encountering any membrane (electrically insulating) boundary. The action potential is slow (about 5s long) and it doesn’t trigger any contractions (glass sponges don’t seem to be able to contract at all). Instead it triggers calcium to enter into the cells that have flagella which whip back and forth to generate the pump. The calcium stops the pump, and the water stops moving through the sponge. Only when the calcium is sequestered into compartments again does the sponge begin pumping.

Most sponges are cellular – and these cells don’t have a way of passing electrical signals (they are not nerves and don’t appear to be ‘coupled’ electrically). So what seems to happen is that they when they sense some change (could be a change in flow around them) calcium enters one cell, and that causes the release of a chemical which triggers calcium to enter into the next cell, and so on until the wave of signal and response has moved across the whole sponge. We think this occurs by calcium because the behaviour is very slow. We see a sponge sneeze for example (ahhhhh choooo) in about 20 minutes.

CB: The bulk of your work takes place in a lab setting, do you culture all of your own sponges or do you collect them from the field?

SL: We do both. For most work we need to collect sponges from the field…and work with them there. Sponges are picky, and sensitive to water quality, and know if the flow in a tank is poor or the food different, and that makes them pump less and eventually not do very well. So for many questions we need to study them in the field. We then also need to collect fresh pieces of sponges to preserve for studies on genes or structure. But, for some of our work we have found that it’s really easy to hatch out and culture a little freshwater sponge in Petri dishes in the lab. Freshwater sponges have a habit of forming little millimeter diameter balls or cysts in the winter. We keep those in the fridge and hatch a sponge from them whenever we want to study the sponge’s behaviour (like its sneezing response).

CB: You are doing some work on the unusual Glass Sponges in British Columbia.  What does your work involve?  Is there a conservation concern here?

SL: We are mapping the extent of the reefs in the Strait of Georgia, specifically one at the mouth of Howe Sound, one near the outflow of the Fraser River and one near Galiano Island. We’ve mapped them to know how much of the reef is made up of living and how much of dead sponges, what other animals live there, and to understand how they grow so we might be able to predict how best to protect them. We’re also studying their reproduction and trying to determine whether individuals beside each other arise from budding off of neighbors or if they have come in as larvae from other reefs. This will help us understand if all the reefs are able to replenish each other, and have a good genetic mix, or if they really rely on local sponges for new recruits and for continued health.

The reefs are a major home for crabs, shrimp and fish (less so for other invertebrates it seems, although worms are abundant in the mud of the reef framework below the live animals). Since these are commercially important animals on the BC coast, we can infer that the sponge reefs play an important role in maintaining healthy populations for fisheries. At the moment our work represents a base line of data and a regular monitoring program (and even tagging, and recapture program) would tell us whether the reefs are nurseries for fish, and replenish populations elsewhere.

For a long time we have also been studying how the sponges feed, what they feed on, and what role they play in the capture of nutrients from the water column and recycling of carbon and nitrogen o surface waters. It turns out that the reefs filter vast amounts of water each day (a 1km stretch of Galiano reef filters about 83,000 Litres each second), so they are clearly massively important to the local water. What would happen to the quality/content of the water in the Strait of Georgia without the sponge reefs is completely unknown. Probably a lot of carbon would end up as sludge on the bottom, and not be returned to surface waters for use by plankton.

So you can see that although we don’t study conservation directly, we aim to provide basic information that will allow DFO and politicians (and people in general) to make informed decisions – hopefully to protect the reefs and thereby to protect our waters.

CB: What’s a typical work day like for you?

SL: On typical a week day I’ll bike in to the U of A with my husband, who heads off to teach at a high school. I usually spend the first hour or two reading and responding to mail, and dealing with administrative things. I then either start work with one of my students (when they get in!), either in the lab or in another lab. I do a lot of lab work, often with one of my group. We might do an experiment on the microscope, or extract RNA for molecular work, or fix or process tissue for electron microscopy. I’ll often consult with one or more of my colleagues, either locally or by skype during the morning;  I work with people all over the world, so this can happen at different times of the day. Then I may meet with one of my group to discuss a thesis chapters or a paper we are working on; that can take a couple of hours, and then it’s back to either some more lab work or reviews of papers or literature searches. I usually have a spinning (biking) class or go to the gym in the late afternoon, and then bike home. At home, I’ll do some gardening and catch up on the day with my husband and on the news on the radio and TV…and read.

A work day at Bamfield is nearly the same but involves a morning kayak rather than a bike, and possibly an afternoon sail instead of the gym! On different days we’ll dive for collection, and I’ll spend a good amount of time fiddling with aquaria working at the microscope, and talking with colleagues and staff.

CB: What is your most recent publication?

SL: Hot off the press is the sponge genome paper, which we just got the proofs of from Nature. This is the culmination of about 10 years work by a lot of people to sequence the first genome of a sponge. The sponge, my pet, was one I found at Heron Island in 1998, so I am quite fond of it!

CB: So exciting, congratulations! Here is a PDF:  nature09201

My other most recent paper is a cool study showing that the ‘neurotransmitters’ GABA and glutamate inhibit and stimulate contractions in the sponge. Who would have thought that sponge ‘muscle’ responds to the same stimulants and inhibitors as vertebrate muscle?

CB: Any advice to budding biologists?

SL: If you really want to do marine biology, then do what interests you most, and do it regardless of the any obstacles you might perceive. It might mean living where you didn’t intend to, traveling more than you thought you might, and working very hard, but the life is so rewarding, so variable and so flexible and so interesting that you will never have a dull moment.

CB: Do you have any non-biological talents?

SL: I love sailing – I grew up sailing, and it’s very much under my skin. We used to race when we were on the coast. Now, whenever there are just two boats on the water it’s a race! I garden, and I like to construct (build) wood sheds, walkways, things!

CB: If you could have 3 guests for dinner…alive or dead…who would they be?

SL: Hemmingway, Alfred Wallace, and Jane Goodall.

CB: What would you eat?

SL: Fish

CB: Thanks so much for taking the time Sally!  I’m humbled at the clear awesomeness of the Poriferans!

I was walking on the beach the other day in beautiful Parksville, BC, when I happened upon a crowd gathered around a group of busy scientists.  Never one to miss out on an opportunity to engage in some nerd-speak I thought I’d poke around and see just what they were up to.

Introducing J.P. Richards, a professor in the department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta, and this week’s specimen in Nerd Corner!

It turns out that the group was digging deep into the vast sandy expanses of Rathtrevor beach in order to extract giant 7 foot cores of sediment.  The sediment cores will be shipped back to the university for a host of chemical and physical analyses that will provide evidence about the geological and biological evolution of the area.

Dr. Richards graciously took a few minutes from his work to answer some questions:

CB: What are you doing here??

JR: We are interested in the coevolution of the biological and geological systems in this area.  In the early 1900s the Englishman River avulsed (abruptly changed its flow pattern) away from this area.  At that time the geomorphology of this bay drastically began to change from an area of strong currents to one of quiescent deposition.  Our work here seeks to address how these geological changes affected the biota, we do this through examination of trace fossils from within the cores.  We’ll be able to determine the animals that were present over the past 100 years.  Our interests bridge the gap between geology and biology.

CB: Any advice to budding biologists?

JR: Follow your passion.  You need to do what you love.  Keep doing what you are doing until it’s not fun any more, and then try something different.  That’s the only way you’re going to be good at this business!

CB: If you could have 3 guests for dinner, alive or dead, who would they be?

JR:  I’d need to invite 4 people if that’s ok.  William Diller Matthew (renowned Canadian paleontologist), Nelson Mandela, and my two daughters, aged 2 and 6.

CB: I should have known you had young kids, my 3 year old daughter was thrilled with the ghost shrimp and crabs that you brought over to her!

CB: What would you eat?

JR: Smoked fish of all types.  Trout, salmon you name it!  Whenever we come to Parksville for field work our first stop is always to French Creek where we buy 4-5 varieties of smoked fish.  It’s my favorite thing!

CB: In addition to his academics, Dr. Richards runs a blog for the academic staff at the University of Alberta, ‘Whither the U of A’.  Thanks so much for taking time from your busy field schedule to chat with me Dr. Richards!

The world famous Monterey Bay Aquarium is looking for a ‘Senior Exhibit Technician’.

This position requires versatile skills and advance knowledge for the design, production, fabrication, installation and maintenance of a complex and diverse array of exhibit graphics and presentation techniques and components; and lighting technology, products and electrical systems. This position demands a skilled craftsman to operate specialized equipment and tools and to perform graphic techniques. Also strong communication and organization skills to carry out production steps with in-house and out of house vendors.

If you are interested in this position or for more details, visit the aquarium’s website.  Good luck!

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