The Dinsdale lab spent Halloween at the 100th annual meeting of the Western Society of Naturalists (WSN) in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. WSN is the premier professional society for marine ecology on the west coast, and they meet every year to present the latest developments in the field from microbes to megafauna. Our lab had a strong showing; we learned a lot, made some new friends, and spread the genomic gospel of the holy holobiont far and wide.We had some great talks from
our fearless leader and charistmatic macrobe, Liz (global whale shark metagenomes), our model metagome modeler Lais (PhD, modeling coral metagenome networks and coral microbiome physiology), and our massively spectacular mass spectrometer expert Asha (PhD, charcterizing shark blood metabolites)!
We also had wonderful posters from our devil weed demystifier Hayden (undergrad, Sargassum horneri‘s effect on giant kelp photochemistry),
our demersal demographer Isabella (undergrad, Chondrichthyan range expansion in western India), and our phylosymbiotic ph-riend Emma (undergrad, categorizing the microbiome of round rays against sharks and teleosts)
We also received an honorable mention for best poster from our shark wrangler, captain Colton (M.S., characterizing the leopard shark microbiome)!
We cannot wait for WSN 2020!
