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Foto Friday: Spring Blooms at Falvey

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

 “A Light Exists in Spring” by Emily Dickinson

 

Everywhere you look around campus, the first signs of spring have taken root. Tree branches bud with leaves, and new flowers splash color at the edges of Falvey Library. So, drink in these long, warm, days, students!


Shawn ProctorShawn Proctor is Communication and Marketing Manager at Falvey Library.

 

 


 


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Curious Cat: Favorite Study Snack

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Happy Thursday, Wildcats! This week, the Curious Cat team wanted to know what students liked to munch on while doing schoolwork. We asked library patrons, “What’s your go-to study snack?”

“Peanut M&M’s + Popcorn”
-Liah Osborne ’25 COE

 

“Smart Food”
-Maris Lindley ’27 VSB

 

“Holy Grounds Muffin”
-Lily Matranga ’25 COE

 


Rebecca AmrickRebecca Amrick is a first-year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.

 

 

 

Julia Wagner ’26 CLAS is a second-year Economics major and student worker at Falvey Library.

 

 

 


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Flashback to BIG EAST Tournament 1968-69

By Abby Stinson

 

Get ready to rally behind our Wildcats this week as the men’s basketball team gears up for the BIG EAST Tournament! As a flashback in the spirit of the season, above is the front cover of the media guide for the 1968-1969 basketball season. These guides, utilized by various media outlets, provided valuable insights into the team and the upcoming season. This historical team was ranked 10th in the final AP poll of the season, boasting an impressive 21-5 record. (They lost in the First Round of the NCAA tournament versus Davidson.)

In this year’s tournament, Villanova, seeded 6th, plays against 11th seed DePaul on Wednesday, March 13 at 9 p.m. Sporting a 17-14 record, our Wildcats promise to make this March Madness season an interesting one.

Tune in to support our team during the most thrilling time of the year for college basketball! 

 


Abby Stinson ’26 VSB, is a Marketing and Business Analytics major and a student worker at Falvey Library.

 

 

 


 


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Meet Dr. Teresa Rose Osborne

By Nancy Foasberg

 

Rose plays with dead Pacific Island land snails in lab.

Rose plays with dead Pacific Island land snails in lab.

“I want as many people as possible to know about this research that I’m so proud of and to read and understand it for themselves.”

-Terese Rose Osborne

 

Welcome to the Villanova Author Interview Series! In this series, Nancy Foasberg, MLS, Falvey’s  Scholarly Communication Librarian interviews authors who have benefited from Falvey’s Scholarship Open Access Reserve Fund (SOAR), which provides financial support to members of the Villanova community who plan to publish in high quality open access publications.

 

Dr. Teresa Rose Osborne

Department: Biology

Title: Postdoctoral Scholar

Article Title: “Flying snails: immigrant selection and the taxon cycle in Pacific Island land snails

Research Interests: Evolutionary ecology of terrestrial invertebrates, particularly land snails, and abiotic challenges to Neotropical ant locomotion

 


Can you tell me more about what inspired your research?
This research started as a term project for my Biogeography course in graduate school, the study of which organisms live where, how they got there, and trends in organism traits over broad spatial scales.

I chose Pacific Island land snails as the focus of my term project. The general assumption among island land snail researchers is that snails travel between islands by being blown by wind or carried by birds and other flying animals. Before my research, I’m aware of only one paper that systematically evaluated the plausibility of wind- and bird-mediated inter-island travel using multiple Pacific archipelagos and multiple land snail groups—and that paper was published back in 1975!

For my term paper, I decided to follow up this previous study using a somewhat different approach. My findings agree with Joseph Vagvolgyi’s—land snail species that occupy multiple archipelagos have smaller shells on average, indicating that land snails that travel great distances between Pacific archipelagos are typically small, consistent with wind and bird transport of land snails.

Later, I decided to turn my term paper into a chapter of my dissertation and eventually a publication. I met with my then committee member (now co-author) Mark Lomolino to discuss how to present my idea in the most scientifically compelling light.

He suggested that I use the concept of the taxon cycle to strengthen my research questions. The taxon cycle hypothesizes that for any given island species and its descendent species (a.k.a. a single taxon), when the taxon is new to an archipelago, it can’t be very picky about the habitats it uses, because it isn’t yet adapted to that archipelago.

In many Pacific Islands, habitat quality increases with island elevation. The taxon cycle predicts that new species will be excluded from high-quality habitats by other locally adapted species, but as the taxon of interest spreads throughout its new archipelago and becomes more locally adapted, it becomes more specialized in its habitat use and can better compete in high-quality, high-elevation habitats.

The taxon cycle predicts that widespread species found on multiple archipelagos would occupy several different kinds of habitats, but only at low elevations; whereas species unique to a single archipelago or single island would each occupy a single kind of habitat and would be found at higher elevations.

My co-author Mark was a big fan of the taxon cycle hypothesis, but I was skeptical of its applicability to land snails; as far as I can tell, no island land snail researchers had ever taken the possibility of the taxon cycle in land snails seriously before.

I tested for associations between how many islands a land snail species occupies, how many different habitats it uses, and its habitat elevation so that I could show Mark that the taxon cycle wasn’t going to work for us. Instead, I found the opposite! The predictions of the taxon cycle were supported in our dataset!

While we have yet to definitively prove that the taxon cycle describes evolution in Pacific Island land snails, we have shown that the possibility can’t be dismissed out of hand.

 

Rose looking at a Pacific Island land snail of the family Partulidae in the Belau archipelago (Republic of Palau, Oceania).

Rose looking at a Pacific Island land snail of the family Partulidae in the Belau archipelago (Republic of Palau, Oceania).

For the non-biologist, what’s the most exciting thing about your research in this paper?
Well, for a non-biologist, I think that the idea of land snails flying across the ocean is pretty exciting! I like to imagine tiny shells blown high in the sky, in what we sometimes call “aerial plankton.” But for another land snail biologist, flying snails are probably the least surprising finding in this paper. I think the scientifically surprising findings are (1) there is evidence consistent with the taxon cycle in Pacific Island land snails, and (2) Pacific Island land snail species that are found only on a single island tend to have small shells. Let me tell you why these results might be surprising to an island land snail researcher.

To my knowledge, island land snail researchers never paid much attention to the taxon cycle hypothesis. I assumed that Pacific Island land snails wouldn’t conform to the taxon cycle, and I was surprised to find otherwise.

If land snails are flying between islands, we would expect that small-bodied land snail species would occupy the greatest number of islands and archipelagos. Indeed, land snails species native to multiple archipelagos are smaller than species native to multiple islands in a single archipelago. However, land snail species native to a single island are just as small as widespread species. Why? Shouldn’t they be bigger, since they travel between islands even less frequently than single-archipelago species do? I don’t know why single-island species are so small, but my best guess is that instead of flying between islands, single-archipelago species might be rafting on vegetation blown out to sea. By being large and living in vegetation, single-archipelago land snails can both avoid traveling away from their home archipelago and better travel within their archipelago. But this still doesn’t explain why single-island land snails tend to be small, instead of, say, a mix of sizes. This one is going to be a puzzle for me for a while.

 

Your article is openly available so that everyone can read it. For you, what’s the benefit of making your work open?
The scientific publishing industry is broken. Researchers make no profits off our publications, and often, we even must pay publishers before their journals will share our work. If we want to read another researcher’s work, we usually must pay for it directly or hope that our institution pays the journal for access. A handful of large, for-profit scientific publishers own many of the scientific journals and profit from the free labor of researchers while selling access to our collective intellectual labor back to us as a scientific community.

I prefer to publish in journals owned and run by scientific societies, which add value to the scientific community not just through their journals, but also through conferences they host, small grants they offer to students and other researchers, and more. If some organization is going to profit from my free labor, I’d rather it’s a scientific society than a for-profit publisher.

I published this research in Frontiers of Biogeography, an open-access journal run by the International Biogeography Society. Frontiers of Biogeography asked that my co-authors and I pay a small fee to help support the journal, and thanks to Falvey’s Scholarship Open Access Reserve (SOAR), Villanova is paying that fee for us.

Rose photographs Pacific Island land snails

Rose photographs Pacific Island land snails

And I’d also rather that other scientists can read the fruits of my labor for free, both because it’s fairer and because more people are likely to read it! Pay-to-read scientific publishing isn’t just unfair to scientists. It also makes it much more difficult for non-scientists to access our work. Anything that makes it harder for non-scientists to access and understand scientific information is dangerous for society.

Unfortunately, pay-to-read publishing isn’t the only problem here. Many scientists—myself included—have a habit of writing in ways that are difficult for anyone outside our subfields to understand, let alone the general public. That’s why I’m participating in Villanova’s research blog series. I want as many people as possible to know about this research that I’m so proud of and to read and understand it for themselves.

 

Now that this article is published, what’s the next direction your research will take?
I’m in a career transition at the moment, so I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. My postdoctoral position at Villanova University ends this summer, and I hope to start a faculty position soon. I’m very curious about how different kinds of environmental challenges impact land snails. In this study, I looked specifically at how travelling between archipelagos impacts shell size. In the future, I’d like to look more closely at whether land snails are rafting between nearby islands in the same archipelago. My previous work also examined how high temperatures, drying out, and the pull of gravity might affect land snail habitat use, shell size, and shell shape, respectively. My future research will continue these lines of inquiry.

For example, here at Villanova, I study how different kinds of environmental challenges affect the way ants run. I’m going to take that same perspective to land snails and see how well land snails of different sizes and shapes can crawl on flat, vertical, and inclined surfaces.

As a kid, I was always fascinated by slugs, and that’s the reason I became a biologist. Slugs are basically snails with small, disc-shaped shells covered with skin. There are even intermediate snail-slug animals called semi-slugs that have a visible external shell that’s too small for the snail to hide in. This makes slugs a great example of evolution in action, because we can see the “missing link” semi-slugs in the world today.

In my future research, I want to investigate what environmental conditions prompt snails to evolve into slugs. Researching slugs will bring my scientific curiosity full-circle and will make the Young Rose who lives in the back of my mind very happy!

 


Nancy Foasberg, MLS, is the Scholarly Communication at Falvey Library.


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Cat in the Stax: Leprechauns

As Falvey’s Cat in the Stax, Rebecca writes articles covering a broad range of topics, from academics to hobbies to random events. All the while highlighting how Falvey Library can enhance your Villanova experience!

Welcome back to campus, Wildcats! I hope you all were able to relax over the break and are coming back refreshed and ready to take on the semester again. If you’re not, no worries! Easter break is two weeks away, so just keep pushing through!

Deck yourself out in green to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day this Sunday, March 17th. In honor of this day dedicated to celebrating all things Irish, I thought I’d write about a popular figure of Irish culture: Leprechauns.

Tales of leprechauns emerged in Irish folklore in the eighth century, supposedly originating from legends of small water sprites in Celtic mythology. Their name comes from the word luchorpán,” meaning small body, as these creatures were said to be around two or three feet tall.

Image by Francis Tyers from WorldHistory.org

The leprechauns of medieval Ireland are very different than the ones we know today. Firstly, these figures were originally dressed in red, not green. As their depiction evolved, their attire was changed to green. Scholars theorize this occurred due to the general popularity of the color in Ireland. Leprechauns were also solitary male faeries or goblins that were old, wrinkled, ugly, and of a solemn disposition, not the youthful, cheery, red-cheeked creatures we know today. They were also figures of mischief and trickery, said to deceive humans and warn against greed.

Some aspects of the legend remain, though. In traditional lore, leprechauns were guardians of hidden treasure–the iconic pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. However, this hidden gold was impossible to find on one’s own, so you had to catch a leprechaun in order to be led to the treasure. Catching a leprechaun was a difficult task by itself; these creatures are incredibly agile and expert in evading traps. If one successfully captured a leprechaun, they would have to keep him in sights at all times or else he would not reveal the location of his treasure.

 

If you’d like to read some stories about leprechauns or are interested in learning more about Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, check out some of these texts below that are available at Falvey:

Image by Judith Chambers from Unsplash.com

 

 


Rebecca Amrick

Rebecca Amrick is a first-year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.


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Scholarship@Villanova Lecture featuring Ed Sion, PhD, on Tuesday, April 9


Please join us on Tuesday, April 9, from 3-4 p.m. in Room 205, Falvey Library, for a talk by Ed Sion, PhD, Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at Villanova University. Dr. Sion will present a talk titled “Accreting White Dwarfs: from Exoplanetary Probes to Classical Novae and Type Ia Supernovae” in honor of his recently published book of the same name (Institute of Physics Publishing, 2023). This event is part of the Scholarship@Villanova lecture series, which is dedicated to recognition of the scholarly publications, ongoing research, and other intellectual contributions of faculty members from all five colleges of Villanova University.

The white dwarfs (WDs) are the terminal evolutionary state of 96% of the roughly 200 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. They are extremely dense because they contain the mass of an average star (like the Sun) compressed into a volume the size of a rocky, metallic planet like Earth. They show us what the Sun will become in the future, the history of star formation in our Galaxy, and a lower limit to the age of the universe. Accreting white dwarfs provide the white dwarf supernovae (Type Ia) that tell us that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, leading to the discovery of dark energy. Their spectra contain the chemical fingerprints that reveal whether the exoplanets that orbit other stars are made of the same material as our own, or not.

This ACS-approved event, co-sponsored by the Department of Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Falvey Library, and the Office of the Provost, is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.


 


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Cat in the Stax: Reading Recs for Women’s History Month

As Falvey’s Cat in the Stax, Rebecca writes articles covering a broad range of topics, from academics to hobbies to random events. All the while highlighting how Falvey Library can enhance your Villanova experience!

Wishing you all a wonderful spring break! Take this time to relax, hang out with friends, spend time with family. You deserve a rest after all the hard work you’ve put into the semester so far.

Photo courtesy of University of Iowa

March doesn’t just signify the arrival of spring break (and the coming of spring), it also marks the beginning of Women’s History Month, which runs from Mar. 1-Mar. 31. This observance first began in California in 1978 as a week-long celebration. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter made the first Presidential Proclamation declaring a week in March as National Women’s History Week. In 1987, Congress passed legislation that designated March as Women’s History Month. Since then, this month has been a time to remember and celebrate the achievements of women throughout American history.

Whether you’re traveling or chilling at home over break, if you have some free time, check out some of these books to read in celebration of Women’s History Month. For your convenience, all these texts are available online through Falvey:

Happy reading! Enjoy the rest of the break, and I’ll see you all next week.


Rebecca Amrick

Rebecca Amrick is a first-year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.


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Birthday Celebration for Father Falvey

Image part of “Villanova’s Library: Revisiting its Past, Envisioning its Future” exhibit, courtesy of Falvey’s Distinctive Collections

By Shawn Proctor

Happy birthday to the Rev. Daniel P. Falvey, OSA, for whom Villanova’s Library is named.

It is fitting tribute to Father Falvey to celebrate his life through the words of the Very Rev. Ralph V. Shuhler, OSA, then Assistant General, on the occasion of the library’s naming and rededication as Falvey Memorial Library on May 5, 1963.

“This library, which is the center of the intellectual life of the University, might well be called his child. He began his life’s work as an Augustinian priest in the Villanova Library as its custodian; and for twenty-five years it was the center of his unremitting care. …his counsel and designs were seen everywhere to make that building as modern and as functional as any library in the country today….

Father Falvey was not content to leave this Library a monument to the imposing campus of Villanova University. He wished to make it the source of intellectual endeavor both for the University students and for the community at large…..But far more important to the Friends of the Library were the human qualities that endeared him to all.”

Learn more about Father Falvey’s life here: https://library.villanova.edu/about-falvey/overview

 


Shawn Proctor Head shot

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Library.

 

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2024 Spring Break Service Hours


Falvey Library Service Desk Hours: Spring Break 2024

Sunday, March 3: Service desk and book stacks closed.

Monday, March 4 through Friday, March 8: 9 a.m.—5 p.m. (book stacks close at 4:30 p.m.)

Saturday, March 9: Service desk and book stacks closed.

Sunday, March 10: 12 p.m.—8 p.m. (book stacks close at 7:30 p.m.)

Semester hours resume on Monday, March 11. Villanova students, faculty, and staff may enter the Library building 24/7 with a valid Wildcard. Library services are available to the University community during posted service hours. Electronic collections (articles, e-books, and more!) are accessible through the Library’s website 24/7. For a full listing of service hours, visit our website.

Have a relaxing and safe break, Wildcats!


Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Her Spring Break reading recommendation: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. (Available in Falvey Library’s Popular Reading Collection.)

 


 


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Curious Cat: Fall or Spring Semester

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Happy Thursday, Wildcats! This week, the Curious Cat team wanted to know which academic semester students preferred. We asked library patrons, “Do you like the fall or spring semester better?”

“Spring!”
-Peyton Walker ’26 CLAS

 

“Fall”
-Ella Heckman ’26 CON

 

“Spring”
-Molly O’Connell ’26 CLAS

 


Rebecca AmrickRebecca Amrick is a first-year graduate student in the English Department and a Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.

 

 

 

Julia Wagner ’26 CLAS is a second-year Economics major and student worker at Falvey Library.

 

 

 


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Last Modified: February 29, 2024

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