Undergraduates get published for field work in the Canadian north
What started off as a typical Arctic Ecology field course in the Canadian north four years ago has led to 21 undergraduate students becoming academic authors in the journal The Canadian Entomologist.
The students were part of the University of Guelph field course in arctic ecology, led by Profs. Alex Smith and Sarah Adamowicz, Department of Integrative Biology. The course was designed to explore the ecological relationships—relationships between organisms and their environment—found in the sub-arctic environments on the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]…designed to explore the ecological relationships…[/pullquote]
Over the course of two weeks, the students—based out of the Northern Studies Research Centre—gathered ant species data to update specimens collected in 1969 by the late Robert E. Gregg, an ant biologist from the University of Colorado.
Using traditional methods of investigation which looked at ant morphology, the form and structure of the specimen, and DNA barcoding—unique gene sequences that acts as biological identifiers—Smith and the undergraduates tried to see if the arrivals from the south had changed significantly since the late 1960s.
“All the barcodes that we collected act as signposts for what we saw in 2012,” says Smith. “This allows students and researchers to go back and compare their results with exactly what previous investigators did, which I think is really important and exciting.”
Using the descriptions Gregg provided of his sampling locations, the students were therefore able to go back to his exact sites and determine if any new ants had arrived, while learning about the different ecosystems and ants within the area. Using an integrative approach that involved DNA and morphological analyses, the students found seven species present at the same sites where Gregg had taken samples 40 years earlier and reported on five species.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]…transitioned from learning the facts to creating new knowledge.[/pullquote]
They concluded that the apparent increase was likely not due to any arrivals from more southern ant species, but to the increased resolution provided by DNA barcodes to better understand the species complexes already resident in the north. They wrote about their experiences and the high-resolution panorama photographs they took while in Churchill in the online
Smith and Adamowicz knew, from previous studies conducted in the north, that species from the south have been establishing themselves in the Arctic, displacing native species—suggesting climate change is disturbing typical ecological distributions. Their results, however, showed that while there was an increase in diversity, it was not due to significant increases of southern species.
Smith hypothesized that this diversity could in fact be due to morphologically cryptic species—species which look exactly (or nearly) identical to another, but actually belong to a different species.
Since then, the Churchill ant species’ DNA barcodes have been added to the Barcode of Life Data System—an interactive and publically available DNA sequence database hosted at the University of Guelph—and are available for students all over the world to examine, just as Gregg had many years ago.
“For the students, the experience is life-changing,” says Smith. “When they first arrive to campus dressed in yellow, black and red, they think all they’ll be doing is learning. Within two years, however, they have transitioned from learning the facts to creating new knowledge. It’s pretty amazing.”
In many ways, the course also helped shaped the student’s lives.
“A month before we left for Churchill, I had written the MCATS so I could apply to the vet college,” says Kate Pare, one of the undergraduates on the trip. “But after this field course I said to myself, ‘No, I’m going to do research.’ It was definitely a 180-degree change.”
Their paper, titled, “The northward distribution of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) 40 years later: revisiting Robert E. Gregg’s 1969 Subarctic collection sites in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada,” can be read here.
Their paper has also been covered as a blog piece on the Entomological Society of Canada’s website here.
The work was financially supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Learning Enhancement Fund of the University of Guelph.