Lab News

April 2025 - Incoming Ph.D. student May Jagodkin is awarded an NSERC USRA to study cardenolide fingerprints from monarchs in natural history collections. Congrats, May!

February 2025 - Micah presents research at the Gordon Conference for Plant-Herbivore Interactions in Pomona, CA. I came away with some great feedback and exciting potential collaborations! I also had a day off at the end of the meeting to appreciate springtime in California.

(Left) Rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) male in coastal sage scrub habitat. (Center) Hillside gooseberry (Ribes californicum) blooming in a mesic oak canyon. (Right) California scrub jay (Aphelocoma californica), one of the most recognizable, charismatic, and noisy members of the California avifauna.

January 2025 - HPLC is installed and fully up and running! First up: running through a large backlog of samples to determine natal host plants of western North American migratory monarchs. This includes building a reference library of chemical fingerprints for monarchs experimentally reared on common western hosts (e.g., Asclepias speciosa, A. eriocarpa, and A. curassavica) and then comparing wild samples to these reference fingerprints. Really excited to finally be able to run my own samples!

January 2025 - Ben presents seminar at Brock University on his research investigating social evolution in Hymenoptera.

January 2025 - Adam has a successful first committee meeting. His dissertation research is taking shape, and he plans to focus on environmental and genetic determinants of migration initiation in milkweed butterflies, including monarchs.

January 2025 - Micah presents seminar at the University of Toronto, Missisauga. Thanks to Kara Layton for hosting! Looking forward to working with colleagues at UTM over the next few years.

December 2024 - Micah presents seminar at the Univeristy of Michigan. Thanks to Marjorie Weber and André Green for hosting and to many faculty and graduate students for stimulating conversations! 

November 2024 - Micah presents seminar at the University of Rochester. Thanks to Jim Fry for hosting and to Nancy Chen and Benjamin Peter for a fun walk around the Mount Hope Cemetery, burial place of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. Only slightly less noteworthy, it is also the site of a cool population of oil beetles (Meloe sp.) used by Robert Minckley in ecology courses at U of R.

September 2024 - Welcome to new 2024-2025 Work Study students Yuliia Hrytskiv, Liz Lo, and Fangming Teng! 

July 2024 - Freedman Lab is up and running at the University of Toronto! Lab renovations are ongoing, but for the time being, we are based on the sixth floor of Ramsay Wright Laboratories. Equipment purchases are underway -- stay tuned for exciting updates!

June 2024 - Notification of funding through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to support major instrument purchases associated with my research program! These will include a liquid chromatography setup, environmental chambers for rearing insects, and tissue preparation supplies.

April 2024 - Notification of funding through the NSERC Discovery Grant Program! This funding will provide support for trainees from 2024-2029 and will enable a research program that studies how environmental change (habitat modification and climate change) have impacted, and will continue to impact, North American monarch butterflies.

April 2024 - New paper published! Near the beginning of my PhD, I thought I might try to focus on island/mainland comparisons of plant defenses and spent a fair bit of time traveling to southern California and the Channel Islands for field work. For a number of reasons, this work didn't materialize into a full dissertation, but I did collect quite a bit of comparative data from two systems: five pairs of chaparral shrub species and a neat perennial mint species (Stachys bullata). In addition to the very cool geographic setting for this work, one of my favorite aspects of this project was developing a new method for quantifying cyanogenic glycosides from field-collected plant tissue using commercially available wastewater test kits. This research was funded in part by the Mildred E. Mathias Graduate Student Research Grant Program and was conducted in conjunction with the UC Natural Reserve System, the National Parks System, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. The paper made the cover for the April issue of Plants (see here).

(Left) Stachys bullata growing in a canyon on Santa Cruz Island. (Center) The endemic island ceanothus (Ceanothus arboreus) on a bluff above Pelican Bay, Santa Cruz Island. (Right) The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, where I was fortunate to be able to maintain a two-year common garden study of defense trait expression in S. bullata.

January 2024 - Micah recently participated in a workshop held at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California to test new tagging and tracking technologies for monitoring monarch butterfly movement. Four overwintering monarchs were fitted with bluetooth-emitting cellular tracking technology (CTT) tags weighing approximately 60 mg. This is part of an effort to test the feasibility of these tags for monitoring monarch movement within and between overwintering locations. Other participants included folks from the Xerces Society, Althouse & Meade, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Check out pictures below and stay tuned for preliminary findings!

(Left) CTT tag used for monarch tracking. Each unit is solar-powered and has a detection range of up to ~100 meters. (Center) Affixing a CTT tag to a monarch for a pilot study of movement patterns. (Right) Vandenberg Space Force Base hosts multiple overwintering sites, including this one located at Spring Canyon.