News

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...

Deane Bowers - Curator of Entomology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and Professor and Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Deane has been selected this year as one of ten fellows from the Entomological Society of America...

Ruth Hufbauer (Colorado State University), Brett Melbourne (EBIO), Ty Tuff (EBIO graduate student) and co-authors report on their study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Three types of rescue can avert extinction in a changing environment . Preventing extinction of small populations in rapidly changing environments...

Erin Tripp featured in CU connections.

Growing up in Pueblo, Colorado, Savannah Bernal never imagined she’d be taking detailed soil measurements alongside scientists at a windswept Rocky Mountain field site. Now, thanks to a unique summer research program at the University of Colorado Boulder, she’s been given the opportunity to do just that.

The health of Colorado’s bighorn sheep population remains as precarious as the steep alpine terrain the animals inhabit, but a new study led by EBIO graduate student Catherine Driscoll ( Mitton lab ) has found that inbreeding—a common hypothesis for a recent decline—likely isn’t to blame.

An intriguing study involving walking stick insects led by the University of Sheffield in England and the University of Colorado Boulder shows how natural selection, the engine of evolution, can also impede the formation of new species.