Le travail acharné des étudiants (The hard work of students)

Despite the pandemic, I’m glad to say that OWU was still able to hold its Summer Science Research Program, through which I had the absolute pleasure of mentoring two students in research projects. We were originally supposed to spend the summer working in France, and were very disappointed that didn't happen. But we made the best of it. Working remotely from her home in California, Sierra Spears was still able to contribute -- she worked with our collaborators in France to extract head and body temperature data from thermal images of the threatened Pyrenean rock lizard (Iberolacerta bonnali) taken during temperature preference trials. Sierra has become quite the expert on thermal images, including co-authoring a recent review (Taylor et al. 2020, Journal of Experimental Zoology-A, "The thermal ecology and physiology of reptiles and amphibians: A user's guide"). With this current experiment, we are testing whether preferred temperatures, optimal temperatures for performance, or thermal limits are altered when lizards are transplanted down in elevation. In this hyperoxic environment relative to their high-elevation native range, such shifts in thermal performance parameters are predicted by the hierarchical mechanisms of thermal limits framework.

You’ve read about Princeton Vaughn’s project in earlier posts (here and here). Right now, he’s working to obtain images of lizard toes with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). We will then test for relationships of these microstructures with running performance on various substrates. We’ve also been lent a few dozen Podarcis muralis specimens collected in Cincinnati in the 1970s and 80s from the Cincinnati Museum Center so that we can see if this species’ morphology has changed over the last several decades in this novel urban environment.

You can see these and other great presentations of student research as part of the 2020 SSRP symposium. Specifically, check out the presentations by Princeton and Sierra. Both have submitted abstracts to present at the upcoming Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in January, so expect updates on both projects soon!