I don't attend the big conferences in my field that often anymore. I have been to SSE, SMBE, and ESEB in the past, but I find the long drive, several days of talks, and shmoozing a bit exhausting. They also tend to be in the summer, and I am busy with several things that keep me office-ridden right now.
I do, however, have two students (Jill Smith and Chandler Andrews) giving talks at the Evolution 2008 meeting in Minnesota. This will be their first big presentations (aside from posters at smaller meetings), so it's a bit exciting for me (and, no doubt, a little terrifying for them). I tried to warn them about what sorts of questions they would get, but in the end this can be unpredictable. It's not a defence, I told them, it's a chance to share your interesting research.
I am pleased to see that at least one person at Jill's talk thought it went well. In fact, over on his blog, Greg Laden writes:
I was hoping to meet T. Ryan Gregory yesterday. He is listed on the Evolution 2008 program as an author of a talk on genome size. Goodnews/badnews: Gregory did not show, but the talk, given by his coauthor working in his lab, was excellent, so we didn't need him.
Jill presented some (mostly preliminary) results on "megabats" (flying foxes, fruit bats -- technically family Pteropodidae). The project she is completing includes many other mammals, but availability of data and the special interest of these bats, which had essentially never been examined from the perspective of nuclear DNA content, made them the focus of her presentation. She talked about why bats -- now, we have shown, including not just "microbats" -- have small genomes and gave some evidence that this might have something to do with flight, or at least body size. This goes along with work we and others have done with birds (the subject of Chandler's presentation).
It looks like Jill got the standard questions about intraspecific variation, other possible correlations with genome size, and so on. We're interested in these and will be dealing with them. However, in a 15 minute time slot, one cannot get into such details easily.
Congratulations Jill on a job well done -- as I expected it would be!
Thanks also to Greg for the kind words (about Jill, anyway...).
