News

November 25, 2015 • Natural Sciences North American bison adjust their diet seasonally in order to take full advantage of the growing season when grasses become less nutritious, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered. The findings of a new study indicate that bison are not entirely reliant...

Congratulations to Lauren Shoemaker and Topher Weiss-Lehman, who are recipients of the 2016 Dean's Grants! It is very rare when one department has multiple recipients, but EBIO has done this three years in a row, showing what a talented group of graduate students we have. Well done Lauren and Topher!

Flowers from the Petunieae: a colorful system for research and education. Clockwise from top right: Petunia, Calibrachoa, Nierembergia, Brunfelsia Stacey Smith , assistant professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department has just been awarded her NSF Career grant . The NSF CAREER program offers the National Science Foundation's most...

Congratulations to Noah Fierer for his recent involvement in an article published in The New Yorker, regarding his work investigating the microorganisms that live in our household dust. You can read the full article here , as well as the BBC and Discovery News articles on this research. Some of...

Whales have a remarkable social structure much like that in humans and other primates. They form hierarchical societies. In the journal Nature Communications, EBIO graduate student Lauren Shoemaker and colleagues show for the first time that this hierarchical structure is formed by whale song. Their collaborative paper stems from a...

EBIO graduate student, Geoff Legault from the Melbourne lab was selected as the winner of the Volterra award for best student poster in theoretical ecology for his presentation at this year's Ecological Society of America meeting. His poster was entitled "The distribution of birth and death in Daphnia magna: Implications...

EBIO graduate student Tobin Hammer and Professor Deane Bowers were recently featured on the cover of Oecologia . How are herbivorous insects able to subsist on a diet that is often rich in toxic chemical compounds? In this issue Hammer and Bowers outline the ‘Gut microbial facilitation hypothesis,’ arguing that...

In a new study published today in the journal Science, EBIO Professor Pieter Johnson and colleagues demonstrate how community ecology, which focuses on how species interact across different scales of biological organization, can provide new analytical tools for thinking about diseases and their wide-ranging impacts. Despite continued medical advances, infectious...

Climate Change & Film Innovative class uses film making (by Clare Spitzer, EBIO undergraduate). This class brings students of all majors together to learn about film while obtaining a solid science background on climate change through an intense schedule of guest speakers that includes scientists, professors, artists, photographers, adventurers and...

The humble dust collecting in the average American household harbors a teeming menagerie of bacteria and fungi, and as CU postdoctoral scientist Albert Barberán and EBIO Associate Professor Noah Fierer have discovered, it may be able to predict not only the geographic region of a given home, but the gender...