Leache Lab

A new article in the New Yorker tells the incredible story of UC Berkeley professor Tyrone Hayes, and his long fight against industry giant Syngenta’s herbicide (and frogicide) atrazine. To put the story in Star Wars terms, Syngenta is the “Evil Empire”, and the Tyrone Hayes lab is the “Rebel Alliance.”  The Empire seems to have unlimited resources at their disposal for lobbying and pushing their agenda. Meanwhile, scientific studies continue to paint a dismal picture for the impacts of atrizine on the environment.

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. Photograph by Dan Winters.

Ambystoma gracile. Photo by Jared Grummer.

Graduate student Jared Grummer was recently interviewed by the Sammamish Review to discuss salamander breeding and migrations, particularly in rural Seattle areas.

Highlights of the article include the following quotes (not necessarily from Jared):
– “Salamanders, as it happens, are kind of dumb.”
– “There’s nothing more irritating (for other drivers) than when you stop your car to go pick up a salamander,”
– “The males drop a sperm packet, which the females scoop up, and then – voila – there are fertilized eggs.”

You can find the original article here.

Rebecca Harris has a new paper in the journal Evolution on the influence of sampling design on species tree inference. The paper also has a new phylogeny for New World Chickadees.

Link to article.