Sabine Eckmann named director of Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

EckmannSabine Eckmann, Ph.D., will become director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis effective July 1, 2005, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced today. Eckmann joined the Kemper Art Museum as curator in fall 1999 and also regularly teaches seminars in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences. She succeeds Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts, who has led the museum since 1998. Weil, a longtime faculty member in art history, will retire June 30.

Certain female fish have special mating preference

Male Bahamas mosquitofish (left) chasing a female (right).A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that for some fish species, females prefer males with larger sexual organs, and actually choose them for mating. That does not exclude males with an average-sized sex organ, called a gonopodium. These fish out-compete the larger-endowed males in a predator-laden environment because they have a faster burst speed than the males with larger genitalia, thus avoiding predators and staying in the mating game.
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