BIOMESH Project: Engineering and Biology
Betsy Dumont, Director of the Natural History Collections, and Ian Grosse, of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, are collaborating on building BIOMESH, an online resource of for researchers who study biomechanical systems, funded by a four year grant from NSF. Using the engineering method of finite element analysis, the project will develop models of systems such as organs, tissues, skeletons, and cells from common animals such as sunfish, frogs and rats. The goal is to educate biologists about mechanical engineering concepts and methods that can be used to address both basic and applied biological problems. Betsy studies feeding mechanics of bats, and in this case the model would be applied to the mechanical stresses on skulls and how their structure responds.  The BIOMESH project was recently featured in the campus-wide "Report on Research 2008" ,pg. 8.

Extinct Lemur From Madagascar Reassembled
   In August, 2008, Laurie Godfrey (Anthropology) and Natalie Vasey (Anthropology, Portland State University) visited the Vienna Natural History Museum with the express purpose of reuniting parts of a skeleton of a subadult of a rare species of extinct lemur, Hadropithecus stenognathus.  Parts of this individual were first discovered in Andrahomana Cave (southeast Madagascar) in 1899 by a little known explorer named Franz Sikora.  Sikora sent the specimens he found, which included an incomplete skull of the subadult, along with specimens belonging to an infant, juvenile, and adult, to Vienna.
[Complete report ]

Summer Fellowships
 Reports are coming in of the activities of the work this summer by the students supported by the NHC Summer Fellowship program.

   Kristian Brevik, worked on articulating the skeleton of the common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) under the supervision of Al Richmond.   The process involved stripping the flesh, letting the Dermestid beetle colony in the fifth floor of Morrill Science Center clean the bones, and then further cleaning and whitening.  The vertebral column, ribs, and skull are already articulated, with the delicate bones of the flippers awaiting further cleaning.  The completed skeleton will be available this semester for teaching and display purposes.

   Lori Johnson this summer conducted her final field season studying an eastern musk turtle (Sternotherus odoratus) population in Hampden County, MA. Forty individuals were tracked in a lake, a river, and in marshes using radiotelemetry. She focused on multiple aspects of this species’ ecology including habitat use, nesting ecology, causes of mortality, and population demographics, marking over 1,100 individuals in this population, showing that this species is able to reach very high densities in New England. She also documented multiple clutches by females, which may partially explain the ability of this species to reach such high densities, unlike many of our other local turtle species. This is the first time multiple clutching has been documented for a turtle species in New England.  Lori is mentored by Jon Atwood and Al Richmond
   High levels of mortality and illness were found again this year, including deaths from unknown cause. Lori is working with Dr. Charles Innis from the New England Aquarium to collect and submit histological and serological samples from this population to determine the causes of mortality and morbidity. In addition, road mortality has been high at this site. Over 100 turtles were killed on the road this year, and musk turtles comprised 60% of total vehicular fatalities.

   Katie Kauffman this summer completed the first of two planned field seasons studying razorbills (Alca torda) at Mantinicus Rock, a 25-acre island off of Maine.  Razorbills are large black-and-white seabirds in the auk family, and they are listed as Threatened by the state of Maine.  They eat fish and marine invertebrates, which they catch by diving and using their wings to “fly” underwater.  They spend most of the year on the open ocean, but come to offshore islands and coastal cliffs in the summer to breed. Katie’s study aims to describe the foraging and diving behavior of Razorbills breeding and to develop a more complete understanding of the chick diet, and reproductive success of razorbills at Matinicus Rock. Her research will also address the theoretical question of what determines the geographical limits of species’ ranges
This summer Katie used TDRs (time-depth recorders) to study razorbill foraging and diving behavior, attaching six units to breeding adults and recovering three of them. She will analyze data from the TDRs on foraging parameters such as dive frequency, dive depth, ascent and decent rates, dive shape, and time spent underwater and between dives and also hopes to estimate the distance that the birds traveled from the colony on foraging trips.
   Katie and her assistant spent numerous hours sitting in small plywood blinds watching for adults flying in carrying food for chicks and recording how many prey items each bird carried, as well as the types and sizes of prey. She monitored 60 burrows to estimate reproductive success. Checking the contents of the burrows every few days allowed her to determine the portion of eggs that hatched, the portion of chicks that fledged, and the average number of chicks produced per pair.
   Katie is mentored by Paul Sievert.

   David MacMillan spent the summer studying the effects of environmental temperature on thermal tolerance in the Western Fence Lizard, Sceloporus occidentalis. He collected approximately 60 lizards total from four established sites in the Eastern Sierra Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains during two separate trips to California. For all of these individuals he measured the Critical thermal maximum (CTmax) and the Critical thermal minimum (CTmin) in order to understand how environmental temperature can be a force of selection for a geographically widespread organism from heterogeneous environments, even one that is able to behaviorally thermoregulate. This was done at the beginning and the end of the summer to see how see how tolerance to heat or cold can vary within a season as environmental temperature increases or decreases. David also traveled to New Orleans to work with Barney Rees at the University of New Orleans to measure expression levels of Hsp70, a protein that helps to protect an organism from, and is expressed in response to, thermal stress in an attempt to see if the presence of higher levels of Hsp70 are correlated with greater protection for heat or cold stress. He is currently analyzing all the data and preparing reports on the results from this and other work. David works with Duncan Irschick, of the Biology Department.

   Adilia Nogueira, a student from INPA (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, in Manaus, Brazil), worked with Cristina Cox Fernandes. applying several techniques to the description of a new species of electric fish (Microsternarchus) from the Negro River Basin, Amazon.. In addition to clearing and staining specimens in order to examine the bones of this small fish (100 mm), she participated in a computed tomography scanning training session at Amherst College and subsequently built a 3D model in Dr. Betsy Dumont’s lab.  She also visited the Ichthyology collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, and attended the American Society of Ichthyology and Herpetology meetings in Montreal, Canada, with Cristina Cox Fernandes

   Emilienne Rasoazanabary measured and analyzed the data on dentitions in the jaws for mouse lemurs from Andrahomana Cave in southeast Madagascar.  The specimens were collected by Laurie Godfrey in whose lab Emilienne has been working.  She traveled to North Dakota visit with Dr. Frank Cuozzo to ensure that here data would be comparable that which he had collected from the Amboasary Cave. Two species of mouse lemurs live today in Southern Madagascar, and a population of the typical (“common”) western mouse lemur (M. murinus) is today isolated to the east of the cave. ).  It will be interesting to see which species of mouse lemurs were present in the region of Andrahomana in the past, and whether there has been any change in the relative abundance of mouse lemurs with the introduction of rats and disappearance of endemic rodents.   

   Sharlene Santana this summer concentrated on publishing her results from the previous two seasons,  With Betsy Dumont, she submitted a journal article on the patterns of evolution of bite performance and biting behavior of 20 species of Neotropical leaf-nosed bats (Family Phyllostomidae) and two papers for presentation at the meetings of the North American Symposium on Bat Research and the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, respectively.  She also started learning methods of 2D geometric morphometrics to be applied to her bats.

   Nicole Soper Gordon spent her summer months studying the effects of environmental conditions on the ways jewelweed plants (Impatiens capensis) interact with insects. She manipulated sunlight, soil nutrients, soil moisture and soil pH in a series of plots of jewelweed plants. At the end of the season she will take soil samples. On these plants she monitored pollination, insect herbivory, and the presence and number of galls.  There are two species-specific insect gallers that attack jewelweed plants, and both were found during the course of the summer:  a flower bud midge (Schizomyia impatientis) and a leaf rib galler (Cecidomyia fulva). She also kept track of measures of the jewelweed’s growth and reproduction and collected voucher specimens of all of the plants’ pollinators and most of the plants’ insect herbivores.  As a compliment to this project, there was a parallel study using natural sunlight gradients maintained by Jonathan Alfredo López Colón, an undergraduate student Nicole mentored for the summer through the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR).  Data is still being collated from both parts of the project, so statistical results about any of the interactions are not yet available. Nicole’s advisor is Lynn Adler of the Plant, Soil and Insect Sciences Department.

   Natasha Taft continued her morphological studies of the pectoral fins of Scorpaeniform fishes. She is interested in the evolutionary and adaptive patterns in these benthic fishes focusing on the functional modifications of the pectoral fins. This summer Natasha traveled to the Field Museum in Chicago in order to gather anatomical data on several families in this group not available in our Natural History Collections or the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.  She was also able to work with Dr. Leo Smith of the Field Museum, who has generated the most recent phylogeny of Scorpaeniform fishes.
Natasha is a student of Cristina Cox Fernandes, NHC Curator of Fishes.

For a complete listing of the students and their projects please see Spring/Summer 2008 news.