Expert: Dr. Sarah Ruane
This week’s episode comes to you from the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY as part of the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival. Our expert this week is Dr. Sarah Ruane, a herpetologist and assistant professor at Rutgers University.
Herpetologist Dr. Sara Ruane (right)
Dr. Ruane has previously worked at LSU and the American Museum of Natural History. Her work focuses primarily on snakes, and evolutionary biology in particular. At the Ruane Lab, Dr. Ruane and her colleagues are particularly interested in the systematics, phylogenetics, phylogeography of snakes.
Why it Matters:
Much of Dr. Ruane’s work and research help us understand the speciation of snakes, their ecological diversity and their significance in evolutionary biology. With this information, we can discover more about biology and the evolution of not only snakes, but all living organisms.
The mysterious ghost snake
Further Reading:
Check out one of the projects Sara referenced in the podcast where she extracted DNA from one-hundred-year-old snake specimen:
https://sararuane.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/ruane_et_al-2017-molecular_ecology_resources.pdf
Dr. Ruane’s documentation of milksnakes’ responses to climate change:
https://sararuane.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/ruane-plos-one-2015.pdf
Follow Sara:
Website:
https://sararuane.wordpress.com/
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/sara_and_snakes?lang=en