Thirteen-year-old Abby and her mother always disagreed on one point: should Abby let their dog lick her when she returned from school? “Abby! Don’t let the dog lick you,” her mother would scold. “Her tongue is full of bacteria!”

Determined to learn the truth about the level of bacteria in her dog’s mouth, Abby applied for a research grant at the State Hygienic Lab at the University of Iowa. When the lab accepted her proposal and paired her with researcher Gabriella Gerken, Abby began collecting dog and human saliva samples for her investigation. Her findings, detailed in the essay Are Dogs’ Tongues Really Cleaner Than Humans’?, received a 2011 Young Naturalist Award.

When 13-year-old Aidan took a winter hike through the Catskill Mountains, he noticed something spectacular about the bare trees. “I thought trees were a mess of tangled branches,” he would later recall, “But [then] I saw a pattern in the way the tree branches grew.”

Armed with a protractor, Aidan measured the angles of the branches and discovered they grew in a Fibonacci sequence—a mathematical pattern that can be observed throughout nature, from the curve of nautilus shells to the spirals of galaxies. In this famous sequence, each number is the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, continuing infinitely. Could this branch pattern help trees absorb more sunlight? Aidan’s pursuit of that question in his essay The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees earned him a 2011 Young Naturalist Award.

In the last few weeks, 13-year-old Aidan — a 2011 Young Naturalist Award winner whose scientific project, described in his essay The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees, garnered much attention for examining whether patterns of tree leaf distribution were linked to more efficient sunlight collection—received another important lesson in his young scientific career.