AmNat 150

I was thrilled to get to talk at the American Naturalist stand alone meeting in a symposium to highlight influential papers that have been published in the journal. When I saw the call for talks last year I immediately knew that someone had to talk about the Lenski et al. 1991 paper that is typically credited as introducing experimental evolution to the larger eco-evo community (note that microbiologists had already been doing these types of experiments since at the least the 1950s, but somewhere along the line the two groups largely stopped talking to each other). It was a fun talk to put together, since the goal was to highlight the influence of the paper on the field and on my own work. It turns out that wanting to make sure you accurately represent the impact of the work of one of your scientific heros is kind of stressful! I think it worked out though ... The meeting itself was lovely, I had embargoed myself from going to ecology and evolution meetings as a postdoc until this past year and although I learned a LOT going to fungal genetics, cell biology and molecular biology meetings, eco-evo will always be home. Sidenote: I think there's still a lack of both microbiology and mycology in the field, and although I am in the strangely (but perhaps not so unique) precarious position of having no idea where I'm going to end up in the next months and years, I do think work on fungal microbes has important things to tell us about both ecology and evolution.