Hello, all!  The purpose of this post is to introduce myself and talk a little about why I’m taking this course.  A little about me: I’m a senior Marine and Freshwater Biology major. I’m also minoring in genetics. This class actually counts for both my major and minor, which is a pretty sweet deal.

I know a lot of people in this class are big microbe and/or molecular biology enthusiasts. That’s not so much the case with me. My interests are in the area of fish functional morphology, evolution, and systematics. I love to study fish morphological features, especially how they arose, how they are useful to the fish, and what they can tell us from a taxonomic/comparative viewpoint. This has nothing to do with microbes (or does it?)

The reason I’m minoring in genetics (and taking this course) is because I know that morphology is only a small part of how we study organisms. I think genetics has a lot to offer to help us understand the biology of animals; we can build phylogenetic trees based on DNA, understand gene expression (especially during development), examine epigenetic effects of diets and pollutants, and so much more. I may not use these techniques in my graduate research right away, but I want to know about them and generally be up to speed on current molecular technology.

The tendency I’ve noticed with older morphologists is to denounce (or worse, ignore) advances in molecular technology.  On the other hand, I’ve met plenty of molecular biologists and geneticists who would be perfectly content to never actually look at a whole animal. My goal is to find a place somewhere in between – I want to approach my questions about fish morphology and evolution with my mind open to as many techniques and tools possible, while remaining critical (but not distrusting) of new advances in molecular research.

So what does all of this have to do with microbial ecology and evolution? I hope to find out this semester. My goal for this course is to link principles of microbial evolution to what I know about vertebrate evolution. Also, I want to find out how current microbial ecology research can help me in my pursuit of understanding more about fish. I know that many fish rely on symbiotic microbes for many different things (for instance, bioluminescence in one of my favorite families, the Ceratioids).  I hope to be able to relate the articles we read in this course to fish research as much as possible, but more importantly, I hope to learn about microbial ecology and evolution and everything its advances have to offer.

An auxiliary  goal I have for this semester is to end each of my posts with a groan from the reader.  I plan to accomplish this by adding a corny joke that is tangentially related to the topic.  Here’s a start:

Two fish were in a tank.  One says to the other, “You drive, I’ll man the turret.”