Evolution through the eyes of a leaf beetle Teksti: Savi Wartiovaara – Kuvat: Nathan Rank & Savi Wartiovaara
Professor Nathan Rank and Ruby Kaiser are researchers from Sonoma State University, California. I had the pleasure of interviewing them about their work studying the leaf beetle populations of California. What is it you do? Rank: “We’ve been studying leaf beetle populations in California for quite a few years. We are trying to understand how they respond to stress which is increasing now because of the changing climate. [Our topics include] are they able to adapt to stress and how do they adapt. We do a lot of field studies, looking at where they’re found and how abundant they are and how they’ve changed from one year to the next. We do laboratory studies with living beetles in the summer and then we do genetic work on the samples that we’ve run through experiments in the wintertime. My day job is to teach in the biology department at Sonoma State University.” Kaiser: “So I am a student of Nathan Rank and I work on a subset of the work that he does, focusing more on the microbial communities in these beetles and seeing how they might affect their life history traits and stress responses. So I also get to take part in the fieldwork in the mountains and then doing the laboratory work and then data analysis on the genomic work.”
could so that naturally led me into looking at microbes and that kind of stuff. And then a similar story actually – I was initially supposed to work on something entirely different and then I kind of fell into the work with Nathan, due to the coronavirus. He had work that could be done online and I needed to do some research to get my degree, so it ended up working out that way.” What are you doing here in Finland? Kaiser: “I’ve been here from the start of February, on a three month stay. The short answer is I’m doing data analysis, we have heaps of data that need to be analyzed. I applied for a grant to work with supercomputers to learn the best ways to analyze this massive amount of data and then to actually get it done.”
What got you interested in that specific subject? Rank: “Well I was one of those boys who was into dinosaurs. So I was into evolution even before I was ten. When I got a little older, my grandparents took me on trips in the American West [and as a result] I wanted to go out West and study nature. That was step one and then step two was I was trying to get to the tropics and couldn’t get into a course, so I started working in the mountains. And there we go.” Kaiser: “So I kind of have a similar ‘as a child’ -innate interest but I was always interested in the very small things. I wanted to look at as microscopic of a scale as I
Toukokuu 2022
Cute little leaf beetle.
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