Torpor is an incredible strategy that continues to blow my mind🤯. Animals in torpor allow their body temperature to drop, slowing their metabolism and saving energy. In this composite thermal image of a blue-throated mountain-gem: left- asleep, right- torpor. 1/5
I have news! I just joined
@TIFRH_buzz
as faculty 2 weeks ago. It's a crazy change after 11 years of living in the US! But I'm super excited to work with students in India to study animals in the tropics, understand heterothermy better, and help shape Indian ecology!
The nationwide entrance examination for the TIFR Graduate School Admissions will be conducted on December 10, 2023.
Apply here:
Last date to apply: Nov 02, 2023 (Noon)
FAQs:
I will be looking for PhD and/or Int PhD students starting in 2025, so if you're interested in joining my lab (or any others in the TIFR system) as a graduate student please apply!
To apply for PhD & Int MSc-PhD programmes
@TIFRH_buzz
, one of the qualifying written examinations is TIFR GS 2025 (for Physics and Chemistry) / JGEEBILS 2025 (for Biology).
These examinations will be held on Dec 08, 2024 (Sunday).
Apply here:
Looking for a postdoctoral fellowship at the
@CornellBirds
Lab of Ornithology? Applications open for the Rose Fellowship! Due Sept 9, 2023. Apply:
More info:
Happy to answer questions about this fellowship that changed my life :)
To people looking for an independent postdoc fellowship, apply for a Rose fellowship at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology by Oct 4! I've been on it for 2 yrs and I 💕 it. And no, you don't have to be a birder🙃. Happy to answer questions!
@CornellBirds
I am so excited to have been selected to be among this cohort of truly incredible women. We've met twice now and 🤯. The things that can happen when women support each other and receive support ❤️❤️.
We are delighted to announce the 2022 Leading Edge Fellows!
45 superstar postdocs doing cutting-edge research in biochemistry, cell and developmental biology, neuroscience, microbiology, bioinformatics, bioengineering and more!
And this is the same bird later at night in deep torpor- it's practically invisible in the thermal camera because it's almost the same temperature as the outside air! The bird is also barely breathing- I promise this is a video, same speed as the previous! 😃4/5
This is really cool, because it means birds, and not just mammals, under natural temperatures, can fine-tune their body temperatures in torpor. Really makes me wonder what's going on inside them that allows so much flexibility 🤔. This is a sleeping black-chinned hummingbird: 3/5
I'm very excited to be giving a public talk for the Sawaal-Jawaab series hosted by
@TIFRH_buzz
at the wonderful Aaromale cafe on Feb 17. Hyderabad locals, I look forward to seeing you there :)
My last dissertation chapter, on shallow torpor and a heterothermy spectrum in hummingbirds, is puuubbbliiiiiiiiiisssshhhhhheddddd!!!!!! Let me know if you want to read it, I'll send a PDF! And there are some exciting articles covering this work coming out soon ❤️
.
@nushiamme
and colleagues have found that
#hummingbirds
can use shallow torpor, in addition to deep torpor, to conserve energy overnight, which allows them to emerge rapidly from the mini-hibernation when threatened
In our paper on
#hummingbird
heterothermy in
@J_Exp_Biol
, we show that hummingbirds are capable of a range of body temperatures in torpor. Not just normal sleep (temp ~110F / 40C) and deep torpor (~50F / 10C), but an in-between state we call shallow torpor (~80F / 26C). 2/5
Saw 2 bats in
#torpor
today! Right at our institute
@TIFRH_buzz
. Science everywhere you look! And the students/postdocs here are wonderful ❤️. What a great day.
Here's a time lapse Erich made of a rare deep torpor event by a nesting female. These deep torpor nights were just two of 108 nights that we had cameras on females at nests.
Applications open for a visiting student research program at
@TIFRH_buzz
! Deadline Feb 16. Our faculty do research across physics, chemistry, and biology. Later stage BSc/MSc students are eligible. Comes with a stipend and accommodation (if available)!
Excited to give an Ecology Live talk with the
@BritishEcolSoc
about hummingbirds and their strange energy management ways.
Thursday after next, June 25, 10:00 ET / 15:00 BST / 19:30 IST / 22:00 SGT
Register here :)
We organized a symposium on daily
#torpor
for
@SICB_
in Jan 2023, and the symposium participants just published a bunch of papers from the symposium in
@ICB_journal
!! Check out our introduction paper that synthesizes the papers in the issue and the current state of the field!
Our paper on seasonal depression in grass rats, incorporating sleep, fat, sugar consumption, and gut microbiome data just dropped!
DM me for a free access link :)
My inimitable undergraduate mentee Sophia Wolfe crafted this wonderful video about our research a few months ago. My dream of making short videos about our hummingbird research is finally coming true ❤️. Thanks Sophia!
I attended this conference on Avian Biology,
#NSAB
, organised by the Association of Avian Biologists in India
#AABI
, in Dehradun. It was super interesting to learn about all the bird work in India, and about some of its history - bird circadian rhythms studied here since the 80s!
Anusha (
@nushiamme
) is a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She is curious about how animals manage their energetic needs under extreme circumstances, and has studied hornbills in the Western Ghats, and hummingbirds in Ecuador and the US.
1/6
Reminder (I'm so looking forward to this), this is tomorrow (Thursday)! It was strange preparing for this, because it's my dissertation work, but I had to restructure it completely! I defended Dec 2018 but article revisions added so much to it.
#IterativeScience
!
This week's
@BritishEcolSoc
#EcologyLive
talk will be given by
@nushiamme
on Thu 25 June at 15:00 BST. Register now to hear her talk about how hummingbirds can flexibly allocate energy across components of their energy budget:
We're on the cover of the latest issue of
@J_Exp_Biol
for this paper! Look at this beautiful composite image! Normal sleep on the left, transition to torpor in the middle, and deep torpor on the right!💖
Visit my website for a toll-free link to the paper:
Yayy! A paper Erich Eberts (PhD as of last week),
@TattersallG
and I started working on about 6 years ago is now in
@J_Therm_Biol
! Mostly funded by a crowd-sourced
@lets_experiment
grant! Do free-living nesting female hummingbirds get cold at night?
Above is the call for 2024 graduate student applications. Students do lab rotations in 3 labs before choosing a PhD lab. If you're interested in the physiological ecology of birds, or know students who are, let me know! I am not actively recruiting but am happy to chat.
I just got to attend two incredible conferences this week. The first was the first in person
#leadingedge
@LeadingEdgeSymp
symposium! An incredible group of supportive people in the life sciences ❤️❤️. This was hosted at the wonderful
@HHMIJanelia
campus
The
@NewIndianXpress
covered the neat Sawaal Jawaab session last week 😊. I really liked the format of a public science talk in a very pretty cafe setting!
We are organizing a
#torpor
symposium
@SICB_
2023 in Austin, TX! Submit your abstracts for a complementary session talk if you work on daily torpor-adjacent questions! I'm very excited for this symposium 🥳
There is an exciting lineup of symposia at this year's meeting. Most symposia also have complementary oral and/or poster sessions. If your research aligns well with any of these research areas, consider contributing to those complementary sessions.
Most of the emails I've been sending and receiving now start with "Sorry to get back to you late" Maybe we should all just stop apologizing and know everything's crazy for everyone?
#AcademicTwitter
Have you ever wondered what animals do when they don’t have enough food available? Or when it’s too cold or hot for them to be outside and they don’t have heater/ACs rooms? 1/
Do you know of any species in India that might use such strategies? Let us know in the comments. And come attend this Sawaal-Jawab event hosted by
@TIFRH_buzz
!
Feb 17, 2024 (Sat, tomorrow)
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Venue: Aaromale Cafe, Hyderabad
Entry free. All are welcome.
Larger animals are more efficient, but what about
#hummingbirds
? Anusha Shankar's
@nushiamme
allometry of daily energy expenditure shows hummingbirds increase efficiency only slightly with size, likely because of all the hovering!
Applications are now open for the 2022 Jackson Wild Media Lab! Make science & conservation media that matters with mentors, peers, & expert gear. Apply now at ! 🎬
@jacksonwild
@TangledBankHHMI
#scicomm
@EstienCesar
This is a really useful tool to get a sense of some journals possibilities, ranked by relevance and impact factor and similar articles. Just need to enter a title/abstract!
Hummingbirds:
- Eat every fifteen minutes.
- Eat the size-adjusted-equivalent of a can of soda's worth of sugar per minute
- Could die if they don't eat for two hours.
- Make tiny magical nests made of spiderwebs.
I was honestly feeling a little bleh and headachey with the cloudy weather this morning, but talking to kindergarteners and first graders about hummingbird cleared up the bleh very quick 😬😬. These littles ask
@NSF
proposal level questions! (
#Scicomm
for selfish reasons).
Read this month's Editors' Choice paper, A heterothermic spectrum in hummingbirds, by
@nushiamme
, Isabelle Cisneros, Sarah Thompson, Catherine Graham and
@Lampornis
We were delighted to host our inaugural Global South Workshop in South Africa this year, organised by Kênia Bícego
@LafitiB
& Andrea Fuller
@AndreaFuller06
. Read about this unique experience and hear from those who attended.
#BiologistsWorkshops
If you're a female
@SICB_
member and are a PhD student/postdoc, consider applying for the Dorothy Skinner award! I had the honor of winning it last year, and strongly encourage you to apply! The deadline this year is Oct 20, 2021.
@SICB_DEE
@sicb_dcpb
I'm giving a talk with an organization called
@Hidden_Compass
on some of the interesting things we can learn from studying torpor in birds! This is a ticketed event on February 15, 6-7pm PT, 9-10pm ET. Find out more here :
Me, writing an email:
I'm using an exclamation point so you know I'm friendly and excited! But now I'm using a period so that you know I'm not crazy. Here's another sentence with a period as a buffer, proving my normalness. Thanks so much!
Spent all day trying different things to maximize resolution and minimize photobleaching for live cell imaging on the SoRa. I think we are ready to start the real experiment! Here are 2 minutes worth of mitochondria dynamics made from 1400 images.
I also got to spend quality time with some of my closest collaborators right now.
@Lampornis
my mentor of 10 years, Erich Eberts, my mentee-friend-collaborator, and five of my undergrad students!
This
#WomensHistoryMonth
, meet National Geographic Explorer and hummingbird energy expert Anusha Shankar (
@nushiamme
). By studying how hummingbirds burn energy, Anusha hopes to better understand how animals can survive in a changing world.
#WomenInSTEM
Congratulations to Aravind H (graduate student,
@Manishj29
's lab) on receiving the Best Poster Award at the Indian Society of Developmental Biologists Meeting
@InSDB_79
, 2024, organised at the
@BLiSC_India
.
This was a talk I enjoyed putting together! With the benefit of some time and distance to synthesise the science more in my head, from when these papers were published last year :)
Anusha Shankar
@nushiamme
learns lessons from flying ninja hummingbirds on spending energy unusually and flexibly - this week's unmissable
#EcologyLive
talk is now available on Youtube.
Come listen to some awesome talks on bird energy (birds + temperature, oxygen, torpor, climate, elevation) at the Endocrinology and physiology session in Summit 5, 14:00-15:30!
#AOS19AK
Come work with me and the fantastic team
@ArchboldStation
on Florida scrub-jays! Amazing opportunity to learn some great field techniques and do independent research in the Florida scrub.
@DrAngelaT
@KelARobs726
Please RT
Question for you, what is the range of body temperatures a hummingbird can go to and still survive? Once you take the poll, head over to the link below to find out!
Thank you
@_klburke
and
@AmSciMag
for covering our hummingbird heterothermy study!
If you aspire to have a career in conservation or wildlife, imagine that your career is a tree. Your career tree is rooted in your love for nature and your early internships and volunteering experiences may form the solid trunk.
@nushiamme
1/3
Data from
@Lampornis
, Bret Tobalske, & Noemi Camacho was instrumental in figuring out how the nest's insulation contributes to female energetic costs in using/avoiding torpor.
#AOS2022
@AmOrnith
any salsa/bachata dancers interested in going out dancing tonight (or for the next two nights)? Some of us are going around 10pm, DM me to join us!
Ecologists who attend the amazing
@SICB_
conference and consider themselves ecologists/evolutionary biologists, follow
@SICB_DEE
for updates on the Division of Ecology and Evolution! This includes updates on awards and the very exciting social that DEE hosts every year!
@GreenGirrl
So far, passerines don't seem to be able to use deep torpor (i.e. more than 20°C body temperature drop). Some species- like chickadees and pigeons and drop their temperature in the range of 6-12°C to use more shallow torpor though! I'm not sure if warbler torpor has been studied!
@PriyankaHariH
@AcademicChatter
@PhDVoice
@OpenAcademics
I've been using LaTeX just for my CV, started with an overleaf template and learned to modify it. Long term investment, totally worth it! Happy to share mine or give you some tips if you'd like :)
I'm doing a Webinar with
@ExploreInside
National Geographic Learning tomorrow, targeted at school teachers and their students! Tue 5pm EDT / Tue 1pm AKDT. Register to attend or watch later!
This is my first anchor-author paper!! 😬😬😬. And this paper came out just as lead author Erich just beautifully defended his PhD from
@UTSC
last week! Congrats Dr. Eberts!