News

July 11, 2024

Our first Baltimore Checkerspot caterpillar of the season hatches!

This little guy hatched from an egg clutch found by Anngely in a MD site and these hatchlings will help us determine how well they can...

June 20, 2024

New collaborative article shows the dangers of neonicotinoids

After many years of work, a collaborative article between Leslie and scientists from Michigan State University and Iowa State shows the...

June 14, 2024

The Ries Lab gets a private tour

On June 11, Bob Robbins - the head curator of Lepidoptera at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History - gave our lab a tour of the...

June 13, 2019: Leslie attends Monarchs & Milkweed (M&M) meeting at Oaksprings Botanical Library

Anurag Agrawal of Cornell arranged a meeting between monarch and milkweed biologists. It was held at the lovely The Oak Spring Garden Foundation in western Virginia. We learned about research done on the...

June 04, 2019: Baltimore checkerspot article published!

A study on the Baltimore checkerspot and its response to heatwaves during different seasons as well as feeding on an inferior, invasive hostplant is now published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. This research, led by Mariana Abarca...

April 25, 2019: Edge effect article disputing common wisdom about predators is online early at Ecology

A study that is a collaboration with our own Biology Department's Gina Wimp and Danny Lewis (as well as Shannon Murphy at Denver University) looking at edge effects on predators just was published online early in Ecology! The study looked at...

April 16, 2019: Mariana gives invited seminar at University of Maryland

Mariana gave a talk in the University of Maryland's Entomology Department. She talked about the research she is doing on Baltimore Checkerspots. UMD has been a center of activity in terms of conservation efforts for the species. There was a...

April 16, 2019: Vaughn Shirey receives a GRFP from NSF! Way to go Vaughn!!!

Wow! Its been a sweet couple of weeks for Vaughn. On top of the news that he received a National Geographic Explorer's award to carry out field research in Canada, he just found out that he was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from NSF....

March 21, 2019: Vaughn Shirey receives Nat'l Geo Explorer's Award

Vaughn just received an award that will cover expenses to do butterfly research in the Boreal forests of the Yukon this summer. He will be working with Greg Breed, a collaborator from University of Alaska - Fairbanks. Vaughn will be accompanied...

February 15, 2019: Fall migration paper accepted for publication in PNAS!

A collaborative research paper (led by Sarah Saunders and Elise Zipkin of Michigan State University) showing that monarch overwinter colony size is still primarily driven by summer population size, but that only nectar availability during fall...

December 12, 2018: Ries gives talks at MSU and Kellog Biological Station

Leslie gave a talk at MSU on monarchs hosted by her good friend and former lab-mate Elise Zipkin. She met there with many collaborators, including students and post-docs from the Zipkin lab and also Scott Swinton who she is working on a...

August 08, 2018: Ries lab receives new funding to re-use NSF-funded data on butterfly thermal ecology

Mariana Abarca will be leading this project to compile data and develop models of thermal responses by tapping into 40 years of NSF research on Pierid butterflies. She will work with the Kingsolver lab at UNC who to compile data from their long...

August 05, 2018: Our first silver-spotted skipper paper accepted for publication!

Mariana is first author on a collaborative paper presenting the results of our first season of rearing of silver-spotted skippers where we used the data to develop a predictive model of phenology. In a collaboration with Martha Weiss and John...