Bonnes nouvelles ! (Good news!)

Some exciting updates from project PODARCIS this week…

First off, the manuscript from our first experiment last fall was just accepted with the fine journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology! The paper is titled “Lizards at the peak: Physiological plasticity does not maintain performance in lizards transplanted to high altitude” and describes the negative effects of high-altitude hypoxia on adult male lizards transplanted up to high elevation. Coincidentally, this is also the journal in which I published my first paper from my PhD work at Iowa State University (Gangloff,Vleck, & Bronikowski, Physiol Biochem Zool 88:550–563). We are very happy to see our work in this great journal – I’ll post more details and a link as soon as the online version is up.

A figure from the upcoming paper. This describes the results of our path analysis, or the causal relationship among the various aspects of physiology and performance we  measured in lizards in normoxia and in high-altitude hypoxia. Path thickness is proportional to the estimated effect, with statistically significant paths (P < 0.05) shown in black and nonsignificant paths in grey. Positive relationships are shown with solid lines and negative relationships with dashed lines. Hct: haematocrit; [Hb]: haemoglobin concentration; V̇CO2peak: peak rate of post-exhaustion CO2 production 

Next off, more good news! We received a grant from LabExTULIP to bring a ‘visiting scientist’ here next spring – my good friend and collaborator Rory Telemeco! LabEx TULIP is a partnership among various French scientific agencies and universities with the goal of developing “a comprehensive theory of the interactions between living organisms in order to study their ability to adapt to environmental changes” – perfect fit for the great work that Rory does. He and I have worked on a number of projects together since meeting in graduate school some years back, most recently our paper describing how oxygen availability interacts with temperature to impact performance curves and thermal tolerance in ectotherms. Rory will be spending about a month here in May and June to accomplish some important research goals: to validate biophysical models for Podarcis muralis (which basically means to write a bunch of equations that predict how various environmental factors determine lizard body temperatures) and also to collect some empirical data to test our recently-proposed Hierarchical Mechanisms of Thermal Limitations hypothesis. Rory will also offer a seminar at the station and have the chance to meet and interact with many of the great folks here. And of course, we’ll enjoy the amazing landscapes, the local cheeses, and the many great wines.

And in yet more fun news, next week I’ll be heading to Paris to offer a seminar titled “Integrating Temperature and Oxygen in Ectotherm Physiology” at the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Paris (iEES Paris). I’m very excited to visit at the invitation of Jean-François Le Galliard, whose work I have closely followed since the first years of my PhD. In addition to meeting Jean-François for the first time, I’ll also see some friends and collaborators – first, the famed PODARCIS Master’s-2 intern Laura Kouyoumdjian, who is now living in Paris. Part-time Moulis resident Andréaz Dupoué is also there, wrapping up his current post-doc before he starts another in Australia. Andréaz recently joined team PODARCIS when he agreed to conduct a lab assay to measure reaction oxygen species in blood plasma samples from our experiment with gravid females last spring (the subject of Laura’s master’s thesis). Since Laura and I are working on these analyses and writing the manuscript at the moment, this will be great timing to put our three heads together and interpret our (very interesting) results. And finally, I’m looking forward to meeting up with Colin Donihue, currently a post-doc with Anthony Herrel at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Colin is a fellow ‘lizard guy’ I met at the Evolution meeting in Montpellier back in August. He’s done some great work with Anolis lizards and gained some national press with a recent paper on how hurricanes select for lizards with larger toe pads so they don’t get pulled off trees. [I also highly recommend this blog post about this study and the importance of basic scientific research.]

Exciting times for project PODARCIS, even if the calendar keeps moving forward to that day in June when my time in France is up…