Lab members had fun meeting social insect scientists from all over the globe, and speaking at the quadrennial Congress of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects in San Diego, California, and The International Congress of Entomology in Helsinki, Finland. We even found honeypot ants (In San Diego, not the land of the midnight sun, of course)!
The Pacific Ocean did not disappoint!
The vegetation around the natural history museum was top notch.
Roman spoke in a session on evolutionary perspectives on social insects. His talk was entitled, "Are Pheidole pilifera majors winter seed-millers?"
Hoon and Christina spoke in a special symposium on spatial structure and organization within social insect colonies. Hoon's talk was entitled, "Intrinsic and extrinsic sources of variation in the hidden nest architecture of the ant, Pheidole pilifera." Christina's talk was entitled, "Arrangement and function of resin and lichen caches in ant nests." Later, Christina spoke in a special symposium on the biology and evolution of social insect symbionts at ICE. Talk: "Phenotypic plasticity in a myrmecophile with numerous ant hosts (Orthoptera: Myrmecophilidae).