John Lighton Lab Collaborators

(An Incomplete List)... comprising those whose pictures (a) we happen to have, and (b) whose likeness we like to see. [Should we apologize to those we left out, or to those we've included?] - Anyway, this page is UNDER CONSTRUCTION - check in again soon, you never know what or who you'll find.

Jon Harrison

Our collaborative work centers around the metabolic physiology of insect flight. At the moment we're concentrating on honeybees - examining capacity/load matching in the honeybee flight motor, among other aspects of honeybee metabolic physiology, in a joint collaboration with Raul Suarez (see below). Another topic is the possible effects of high atmospheric oxygen levels on insects, way back in the carboniferous era when huge insects made the archaic forests look like a B movie set. To this end we're examining the effects of hyperoxia on dragonfly flight (you'll recall that dragonflies with meter wingspans thrived back then). We did that research in Zzyzx. Even modern dragonflies show some relic of ...... but more later. We might also do some collaborative work on discontinuous gas exchange in insects- if and when we find the time! And who knows, possibly some social insect physiological ecology, possibly with Jon's better half, Jennifer Fewell (that's their daughter Emma to Jon's right in the picture).

Raul Suarez

Our collaborative work with Raul is in the area of metabolic biochemistry. After some early collaborative work on hummingbirds, based in Peter Hochachka's lab at UBC, our shared interests have led us inexorably to explore the limits to performance in the most energy-intense living tissue, the insect flight motor. To this end we're working on honeybees (some of this work is in collaboration with Jon Harrison). Basically, we're comparing flight motor metabolic performance in the intact honeybee with estimated metabolic flux rates derived from the Vmax of critical rate-limiting enzymes in the flight motor, and attempting to find out the degree to which capacity and load are matched.

Bernd Heinrich

We should first point out that the photograph to your right is one of the few known depictions of Bernd Heinrich eating a cicada. We introduced him to the locale and the cicadas and things just sort of clicked. That's the Lighton Lab field vehicle, Big Red, in the background, incidentally. Bernd's collaborative work with our lab concerned the evolution of insect flight, and particularly the possible respiratory origins of insect wings. We were originally going to do this work on mayflies but got sidetracked into the Mojave and landed up (as usual, with this lab) at Zzyzx, where we concentrated on dragonflies and butterflies. Bernd's technique with an insect net, incidentally, is sheer poetry to watch. Thanks to the University of Utah's antics, none of this work ended up being published. Should you thank or scold the University of Utah? Only posterity knows.

Stay tuned for more photographs and/or outlines........

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