Embedded Files
In the end we will conserve only what we love;
we will love only what we understand;
and we will understand only what we have been taught.
-Baba Dioum, 1968
As noted by Dioum, positive conservation results can only be expected from a better understanding of the factors affecting the loss of biological diversity, and ultimately disseminating this knowledge. This is a unifying thesis of all academia: gaining understanding, disseminating understanding, and using understanding to defend and advance the greater good.
OUR GOAL
OUR GOAL
In the Goessling lab, we are zoologists who focus our efforts on understanding a diversity of proximate mechanisms and ultimate effects of environmental change on ectothermic tetrapods (i.e., reptiles and amphibians, "herps"). We are taxonomically biased in approach for two reasons. First, we all share at least a basic interest in, if not a love for, reptiles and amphibians; this bias is personal and of no specific scientific merit. Second, because their physiologies are uniquely tied to the environment, especially temperature, these taxa serve as prime experimental models for quantifying the effects of environmental change.
NEWS
NEWS
We are getting ready to attend the Gopher Tortoise Council annual meeting in Gulf Shores, Alabama! Dr. Goessling will be giving the keynote presentation for the conference on Friday morning, during which he will intertwine personal narrative with major scientific understanding of conservation research and interventions.
Our paper on Gopher Tortoise population manipulation, including translocating adults and also head-starting baby tortoises was just published! Check it out here!
Check out a new video that was produced by Elizabeth Kibbey, a Film Studies and Animal Studies major, for her senior capstone project on our Boyd Hill tortoise research.
For a second recent study on tortoise behavior, we recently published a paper on nest-site selection by gopher tortoises at Boyd Hill, in the journal Animal Behaviour. This project was an awesome collaboration of Eckerd College students, a graduate student at the University of South Florida, and other local herpetologists.
We recently published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science one of the most-fun studies we've conducted in our lab on behaviors of headstart baby Gopher Tortoises while in our on-campus rearing facility. A former student, Gabe, was a leading student researcher and coauthor on this paper. Gabe found that young tortoises are curious to meet stranger tortoises! Check back to read the final paper once it's finished with page proofing.
Check out our multi-year study of invasive Boa Constrictors on Aruba! In this, we found that adult female snakes only exist in close association with human developments. This study was conducted with the help of several Eckerd students who conducted fieldwork on Aruba as well as did elaborate spatial analyses to quantify human effects of urbanization. Check it out here.
We wrapped up a six-week student internship on Egmont Key that took us out to the island to update the mark-recapture dataset of Gopher Tortoises there. This study started in 1994, and so far, we have marked more than a thousand individual tortoises! Check out some cool local media attention we got for this project here. The project was supported by The Egmont Key Alliance, Hubbards Marina (who provided daily ferry rides to the island), and several benefactors. Our interns, Jeff, Pixie, Sephie, and Tristan were all top-notch Eckerd students and did awesome jobs!
CONTACT
CONTACT
Please contact Dr. Goessling (goessljm@eckerd.edu) should you be interested in our work.
If you'd like to email our broader Goessling lab group (including numerous Eckerd students!), please email glab-users@eckerd.edu.
Report abuse