Katelyn gets to know the subjects of her experiment. Photo courtesy of Katelyn. Click to enlarge.
When 12-year-old Katelyn took a field trip to a butterfly exhibit, she wondered why butterflies chose certain flowers over others when it came time to feed.
Katelyn hypothesized that butterflies given a choice of flowers would display a preference for certain colors or shapes. To test her idea, Katelyn set up elaborate mini-ecosystems, complete with various floral arrangements, and recorded each time a butterfly inserted its proboscis into a flower, paying special attention to whether butterflies returned to the same flower. Read more »
Fossil preparation requires an uncommon degree of adaptability and patience. Museum preparators bring to the task diverse sets of skills from such backgrounds as art, paleontology, and archaeology. They generally learn their craft on the job, drawing from related fields such as object conservation to adapt modern glues, solvents, and other archival materials to stabilize fragile areas or repair damage.
Watch as Justy Alicea, a preparator at the American Museum of Natural History, works on a specimen and offers a tour of the Museum’s fossil preparation lab. And for more about fossil preparation, read this story, which originally appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of the Members’ magazine Rotunda.
2010 Young Naturalist Award winner Maia studied mammal tracks, including those of coyotes, to investigate preferred habitats in a Wisconsin forest. Photo courtesy of Maya.
Spending a snowy Wisconsin winter investigating forest habitats might seem daunting to some young naturalists, but 15-year-old Maia was up to the challenge.
“From an environmental standpoint, this is a great time to be living in the Baraboo Hills of southern Wisconsin,” writes Maia. “Rugged and inaccessible terrain combined with years of conservation efforts have created the largest block of upland forest in the lower half of the state.” Though conservation efforts were aimed mainly at songbirds, Maia decided to study whether large carnivorous mammals were benefitting as well.
She chose to study three sites within the nearby Nature Conservancy Preserve: a mature woodland, an area that had been reforested 15 years ago, and another site that had been reforested four years ago.
After researching the habitat preferences of local mammals, she predicted how animals would be distributed among the three areas. She marked off specific sites in each of the areas for her survey, then set about collecting data by identifying animal tracks of 13 different mammal species in fresh snowfall–an ingenious way to look for mammals in her local environment. She found that some species, such as raccoons, only inhabited the mature forest, while others, such as coyotes, favored the four-year-old reforested habitat only for hunting. Learn more about Maia’s findings, and read about the projects of the 12 other Young Naturalist Award winners of 2010, on the Young Naturalist Awards website. Read more »
Cycads — plants with a 300-million-year-old evolutionary history — have suffered staggering declines in recent years. One species, Cycas micronesica, which is endemic to Guam and other islands, has lost over 90 percent of its population within the a period of four years due to invasive species and habitat loss. But new research from a team that includes Museum scientists recently found that genetic diversity among these cycads offers hope for future conservation efforts.
The team, which includes Museum researcher Angélica Cibrían-Jaramillo, sampled this species on Guam and analyzed their genetic relationships. The results showed that local populations have some genetic diversity and moderate genetic variation with some inbreeding, which is what would be expected in longer-lived plants with similar patterns of seed dispersal.
The research also shows that cycads in the south, where smaller Cycas micronesica seeds float long distances along rivers unhampered by dense forests, are more genetically diverse than cycad populations in the north.
Researchers expect that these findings will provide tools for conservation efforts.
“We hope these results from the plant perspective will fit into the management of invasive insects in general, which is one of the most important drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide and very costly economically,” says Museum Curator Rob DeSalle, who conducts research in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics.
Cibrián-Jaramillo, who is also a researcher at The New York Botanical Garden, and DeSalle collaborated with Thomas Marley of the University of Guam, Aidan Daley of the Museum’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, and Eric Brenner of New York University.
For more information, see the Museum’s press release.
Cycads — plants with a 300-million-year-old evolutionary history — have suffered staggering declines in recent years. One species, Cycas micronesica, which is endemic to Guam and other islands, has lost over 90 percent of its population within the a period of four years due to invasive species and habitat loss. But new research from a team that includes Museum scientists recently found that genetic diversity among these cycads offers hope for future conservation efforts.
