Jay Storz, George Holmes Professor of Biological Sciences, will give the next Nebraska Lecture on Oct. 6 at 3:30 p.m. in the Nebraska Union's Swanson Auditorium (livestream also available).
What are the environmental limits of animal life? Storz and his South American collaborators are conducting extreme high-elevation surveys of Andean animals. The fieldwork involves mountain climbing and zoological surveys in extremely remote regions of the Central Andes that are unexplored by biologists. These surveys have yielded new world records for multiple species of small mammals (mostly mice!) living on or near the summits of more than 22,000 volcanoes. Such elevations were previously thought to be completely uninhabitable. Ongoing genomic and physiological experiments are revealing the adaptive mechanisms that enable the high-elevation mice to survive in such hostile conditions.
Storz’s talk will also cover Indigenous Andean cultures, from the time of the Incan Empire to the present, and their relationship to sacred Andean peaks.
The Office of Research and Innovation partners with the Office of the Chancellor and the Research Council, in collaboration with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, to sponsor the Nebraska Lectures: the Chancellor’s Distinguished Speaker Series.
