Big Biology

How do you find an invasive species that no net can catch? What happens to the scientist whose research samples end up in federal court?

In this episode, we talk with David Lodge, a freshwater ecologist at Cornell University and past president of the Ecological Society of America. In 2009, David’s lab detected invasive carp from DNA in bottles of Illinois River water, including above the electric barrier meant to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes. That result helped found the field of environmental DNA, and it brought congressional testimony, a Supreme Court filing, and five hours of unfriendly questioning on the witness stand. Drawing on David’s recent retrospective in the journal Environmental DNA, we follow the science from a cup of water to the courtroom, visit the Wisconsin lakes where the invasive crayfish he has watched for more than forty years are now collapsing on their own, perhaps driven by a parasite new to science, and ask what it takes for science to inform policy without pretending to drive it.

Cover art by Brianna Longo.

What was distinctive about Bob Ricklefs’ mentorship style, and how did he influence his students and collaborators? What were Bob’s major contributions to biology, and how did these ideas leave a lasting legacy on the field?

In this episode, we commemorate the life and work of Bob Ricklefs, who passed away recently. Bob was a giant in the fields of ecolo…

How have flowers shaped the modern world? Why do we and many other species have such intimate and long-term relationships with them?

On this special episode, we talk with David George Haskell, a writer and biologist. We discuss his most recent book, How Flowers Made our World, which explores the creative powers of flowering plants. Big Biology blogger and Biology PhD student, Clayton Glasgow, interviews David as an outreach project for the Young Voices of Science program. They discuss how flowers have played key roles in many ecosystems, the genomic innovations that underpinned the success of flowering plants, and the significant relationship between humans and flowers.

Cover art by Brianna Longo.

When a bee visits a flower, what decides the match? How can a neutral model explain community assemblages? Why are long-term ecological studies so important?

In this episode, we talk with Diego Vázquez, a community ecologist at CONICET in Mendoza, Argentina, who has spent his career mapping the networks of interaction between plants and pollinators. Textbooks still teach coevolution as tight, faithful pairs, but Diego’s work tells a different story, that specialists mostly interact with generalists, and the best predictor of pollinator visits to plants turns out to be not matching traits or shared ancestry but abundance. Much of the structure ecologists prize in these networks can emerge from “neutral” models that know only who is common and when. We dig into why predicting these interactions remains hard, what his twenty-years of data on declining solitary bees is showing, and what it takes to keep long-term ecology alive in Argentina after deep cuts to science funding.

Cover art by Brianna Longo

What have so many influential scientists been at some time been ridiculed and disbelieved by their peers or institutions? What reforms could foster bolder and more innovative science?

In this episode we talk with Matt Kaplan, a science correspondent at The Economist and author, about his most recent book I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exil…

How do hormones help animals cope with stress, seasons, and climate change? What is allostasis?

In this episode, our guest is John Wingfield, Emeritus Professor of Physiology and Behavior, at the University of California, Davis. John helped develop many fundamental hypotheses in the field of endocrinology through his work on wild bird populations, in particular the white-crowned sparrow. Fran Bonier, a former PhD student of John’s and now Professor of Biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, also joined us for the chat.

We talk with John about how he got interested in understanding wildlife endocrinology, and discuss how he helped formulate the “challenge hypothesis”, “emergency life history hypothesis”, and the concept of “allostasis”. And at the end, John gives some advice to early career researchers, based on his experience as the head of the Biology Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

Cover art by Brianna Longo.

How do you experimentally test theories of island biogeography? Who were the Tallahassee Mafia? Why do some introduced species become invasive and reshape ecosystems?

On this episode, we bring you a live recorded conversation we had with Daniel (Dan) Simberloff at the Laurel Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee. Dan Simberloff is the Nancy Gore Hunger Chair o…

How is climate change affecting the movements of small predators in the sea? How do diatoms affect ocean carbon cycling? How do Cassiopea jellyfish act like ecosystem engineers?

On this episode, we bring you a live conversation from the recent University of South Florida Climate Teach-In where Marty interviewed his colleague, Associate Professor from the…

What role do genes play in complex human behaviors? If behavior is largely shaped by a combination of experience and luck, how should we rethink blame, punishment, and forgiveness?

In this episode, we talk with Kathryn Paige Harden, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and…

What are eco‑evolutionary dynamics and how can we study them in the wild? Why do some fish evolve placentas?

In this episode, we talk with David Reznick, Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of California, Riverside. David has spent much of his career studying Trinidadian guppies to understand adaptation in the wild. In our conversation, …