Emily Gelzer (g sound, not j sound, as I thought) is from Durango, Colorado. She describes Durango as a small town in the Southwest portion of Colorado. Her school, Ft. Lewis College, is a small one, but she speaks highly of it as well. Her and her friends spend their time outside of class on rafting trips on the Animas (meaning lost souls) and Arkansas rivers. I told her she was a river hippie, but she calls it a river rat. She is even on a waiting list to raft the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon! Here at el Verde, Emily will be studying how leaf litter exclusion can effect macroinvertebrate assemblages and their break down of leaf litter.
Emilys mentor is Keysa Rosas an upcoming masters student at Georgia Southern University. She will be studying secondary production of stream insects.
Kirsten Verster is from Miami, Florida. She attends the University of Florida at Gainesville and has already been through 2 REU programs, plus this one! One was at her school, in the butterfly lab and the second was working on wasps at the University of Michigan. At school, she works in two labs. First, is in the Miller lab, where she works with cactus bugs. The second is in the museum with Keith Willmott working on neotropical butterfly taxonomy. She is a free spirit who really knows how to cook. Kirsten loves spiders and wasps. Needless to say, her work will focus on web building spiders this summer. Specifically, she is curious about how typical orb style spider web angle and placement change as you leave the immediate riparian zone.
Her mentor is Sean Kelly, a PhD student at UPR who looks at the relationships between emerging aquatic insects and web building spiders.
Elena Venable is from the west coast, Santa Cruz, CA. Although she attends Brown University in Providence, RI, she really associates with her hometown and wants to move back there someday. She plays soccer and runs track. She is an applied math-biology major and already has an internship with NOAA set up next summer! Elena and I initially got to talking because I noticed her water bottle has a KAZU 90.3 NPR label on it. Good to see the support for public radio in unexpected places. Here, her work focus on the Puerto Rican clame to fame, the Coqui frog, specifically, the grass coqui, E. Brittoni (See earlier blog for a link to a video of this squeally little frog).
Her mentor is Adriana Hererra-Montes, who is from columbia originally. She is a PhD candidate at the UPR Rio Piedras and her dissertation focuses on Puerto Rican herpetofauna assemblages. Woah.
Amanda Henderson is from Chicago and she attends DePaul University. Back home in Chicago, Heneghan's Lab, where she works with soil mites, specifically Oppiella Nova. Check her out, in action, here on Heneghan's blog. Amanda is the noctural one of the group, where she stays up until 1-2 AM sometimes (given we have power) to be productive. She says "I am not productive before 11PM" with a whole lot of sass. We really love the sass, that for sure. Here, at El Verde, she will be continuing her research on mites, but with a new focus, the Brevipalpus spp, a false spider mite found in the tropics.
Her mentor is Elvia Meléndez-Ackerman, a professor at the UPR Rio Piedras and she is a busy body, check her out!
Wilmarie del Colon is a student of the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. In the past, she was involved in a student chapter of CESAM where she went to Costa Rica for a national meeting to talk about problems affecting coral and other marine organisms. Her undergraduate thesis is on the difference in biofilms across urban streams, one natural and one channelized. Channelized, meaning that the stream is perfectly straight and an unnatural stream structure. Having Wilmarie (Wiwi) here is so great because she has so much knowledge about the people, history, and culture of Puerto Rico. Her project at El Verde focuses on a population of flower, P. Angustifolia, that is sometimes subject to nectar robbing. Nectar robbers literally create a hole at the base of the flowers corolla tube and get the nectar without offering pollination services for the flower. (The hole is visible, I will try to get a photo of it soon!)
Her mentor is Jose Fumero, a botanist at Metropolitan University.
Ismael Orengo, the only male in the program is from Puerto Rico also. Trujillo Alto is his hometown. He attends Metropolitan University in Coupey, Puerto Rico. He has been spending his summers in Vermont working on projects on stream macroinvertibrates for the past two years. We have really come to love Ismael. He is so great to have around. Ismael learned english as a second language. He is a story teller for sure, and his storytelling is great. He is very animated and always excited. His project here at El Verde focuses on the effect of acidification on freshwater macroinvertibrates.
His mentor is Pablo Gutierrez and he is a PhD student at UPR Rio Piedras, focusing on limnology.
Our TA, Pedro aka PJ is pretty cool too. He has been a mentor for REU students in the past but this year, he is back as our TA aka, he takes us to the grocery store, field sites, wherever we need/want to go and out on the weekends. (Yes, a permanent DD. We are within the law!) He is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia at Athens (yeah, he knows Terrapin Brewery!), whose dissertation focus on the effect of dams on ecosystem processes such as decomposition, nutrient cycling and metabolism. PJ is a cool TA. He is going to make us sangria, real sangria sooner or later and made us bourbon chicken at our celebratory BBQ for completing our proposals.
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