Student volunteer project available!

I have a cool project for interested students at Macquarie (or from anywhere, really). The aim of this experiment is to find out ways to trick male jumping spiders into displaying aggressive or mating displays, using artificial stimuli. This will add to our knowledge about the various sensory modes involved in jumping spider communication.

Here's some general info: 

http://ximenanelson.weebly.com/spider-vision.html

http://excusememrscientist.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-i-do-part-1-why-jumping-spiders.html

Skills you will learn: Finding jumping spiders in the field (they're everywhere around MQ), designing experimental protocols, running experiments, working with video, analysing behavioural data. The framework for the experiment is in place, but it is still flexible so you will have room to be creative. The project will take a few weeks, depending on how much time you can put in. Just be aware that this is meant to be a full project from beginning to end, with the possibility of co-authoring a publication once it's done. No previous experience is needed, but as this is a complete research project you should have good organisational skills and be able to work independently to a degree. Bonus if you're comfortable with handling video equipment + software.

If you're interested or have any questions, please contact me at daniel.zurek@mq.edu.au.

Neuroethology poster

Just got my posters printed, I decided to go landscape this time - the photo with the curious spider was just too tempting. Here is the one for the Gordon Neuroethology conference in mid-August. Five awesome sciency weeks start on sunday!

Gearing up for conferences

These are the last weeks before my next conference trip, and I'm busy making posters for Behavior '11 and the Gordon Neuroethology meeting. I'm very excited! This week I found some time to take a few new photos of my spiders with the GF-1. I really love this camera, but was a bit unsure about shooting macro with it ... my current setup with a telephoto lens and a clip-on raynox macro converter works okay, but it's extremely hard to get good shots at higher magification. Definitely useable as poster eye candy though :-) But the next investment will definitely be a proper macro lens + flash.

Awesomeness

This put a huge grin on my furrowed, overworked face. So big that I have to repost it on this poor post-hungry blog. Genius poem about how to deal with woowoo people.