Join us at the c.1949 beer garden with Christian Brown, Dennis Giardina, and Sarah Grasty for Ecology 101: from tree tops to seafloor!

Christian will be sharing recent findings, photos, and stories from his studies tracking Wandering Salamanders, Dennis will discuss efforts to reintroduce native orchids that once flourished in the Florida Everglades, and Sarah will take us under the sea to see how her group maps the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

Christian Brown

Salamanders in the sky: when and why do they come down?

High in the crowns of the world’s tallest trees lives an unexpected resident, the Wandering Salamander. Soil mats anchored by ferns provide refuge for this perplexing amphibian at all life stages. Tracking tagged salamanders for multiple years has revealed that they occasionally move to the forest floor, and that they do not immediately return to the tree crown. Through pictures and stories we will visit a redwood crown and hypothesize what shapes the movements of the salamanders within.

Dennis Giardina

Bringing Back the “Lost Orchids”

Dennis Giardina is the Everglades Region Biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation. He works with endangered and invasive wildlife and will be talking about an international collaboration to repatriate four species of native orchids that were extirpated from the Everglades Region, using seeds from the nearest wild populations which occur in Western Cuba.

Sarah Grasty

The Life and Times of Fish Paparazzi

Sarah will be describing the work her group, C-SCAMP, is doing in the Gulf of Mexico. She will focus on a current project which involves actively mapping certain portions of the seafloor between 60 and 300 feet followed by "ground-truthing" these areas with an underwater camera system.

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