Reviving the CPBS Summer Seminar Series

Article By: Johnica Morrow

One of my first dinner conversations here at Cedar Point was with Dr. Charles Brown, a researcher that has been gracing CPBS with his presence for the past three decades.  Dr. Brown, a prominent ornithologist with a love for cliff swallows, began to tell me about the good old days...days when Cedar Point had regular seminars.  This piqued my interest so naturally, I had to know more.  It turns out that the station once hosted a variety of seminars 3-5 times over the course of the summer.  I have yet to find records regarding the topics of these seminars, but the suggestion of their prior existence was enough to get the ball rolling for this summer.  

One of the many posters announcing a seminar this summer.

After that conversation, I went to work.  I gained approval from Jon Garbisch, our associate director.  I tracked down the e-mail addresses of every professor that would be out here teaching for the summer and I sent them an e-mail asking them to pick a day to present.  I made posters that found their way onto the bulletin board and the window of the dinning hall door.  Then I sent out another round of e-mails...and a few other rounds after that.  (You'd be surprised how hard it is to convince professors to talk for an hour about their research!)  

Little by little, the summer roster began to fill.  I was able to book professors, master's students, PhD students, and even interns to speak.  The basement of Goodall Lodge became the place to be at 7:00pm on Wednesday nights.  Though we didn't get the number of students we had hoped for, we did get a good deal of interest.  The students that did come were enthusiastic with queries that sparked lively discussions on a wide range of topics.

Jamie Briske and Zach Schafer gave a presentation about their summer internship.

By now you are probably wondering who spoke this summer and what those people spoke about.  Fear not, faithful readers!  Below is a list to satisfy those nagging questions...just for you.

May 22nd

Dr. Charles Brown

Where has all the roadkill gone?: Long-term changes in
highway-associated mortality of cliff swallows

May 29th

Dr. John Faaborg

Long-term monitoring of bird populations
in Puerto Rico and Missouri

June 5th

Alicia Burke

Mature forest bird use of regenerating clearcuts:
Convenience or Necessity?

June 12th

Linden Reid

Helminths of Micaelamys namaquensis
and Aethomys chrysophilus (Rodentia: Muridae)
from Northwestern Botswana

June 19th

Johnica Morrow

Spider diversity of
Cedar Point Biological Station

June 26th

Matt Adams

Arachnological facts and fiction:
How to tell when they're pulling the web over your eyes

July 3rd

Dr. Charles Brown

Coloniality in the cliff swallow:
Insights from thirty years of research

July 10th

Jamie Briske & Zach Schafer

Two year plan on the conservation of piping plovers

July 17th

Johnica Morrow

Archaeoparasitology:
Digging into our parasitological past

 July 24th

Dr. Scott Gardner

Global parasite biodiversity inventories

July 31st

Francisco Tiago de Vasconcelos Melo

Complimentary tools for helmnith taxonomy

Linden Reid gave a seminar regarding nematode taxonomy.

After a summer of swallows, spiders, and parasites, it is clear that the CPBS summer seminar series has been successfully resurrected.  It will be exciting to see what sorts of seminars will be given next year as new people spend their first summer at Cedar Point and seasoned Cedar Pointians return for their yearly dose.  I would especially like to thank Dr. Charles Brown for instigating the return of the seminar series...even if he didn't make it to either of my talks! :-p (You'd better be there next year, Charles!)

If you will be around the station sometime next summer
and would like to give a talk, please e-mail us at cpbs2@unl.edu.  

Include in your e-mail the dates you will be 

staying at CPBS and the title of your presentation.  

We will contact you when your talk has been booked.

Thanks! Can't wait to see you speak next summer!

An excerpt from THE GINKGO: AN INTELLECTUAL AND VISIONARY COMING-OF-AGE

 Excerpt Submitted By: John Janovy, Jr.

 

In this excerpt, a teacher has traveled to western Nebraska for the express purpose of finding the right tasks to assign to an exceptionally creative and insightful student—typical of those recruited into Field Parasitology and who are now established scientists or successful teachers or health care providers. The scene takes place at a well tank that is modeled after the Nevens collecting site used by so many CPBS students. The town of Bodmer is actually Paxton. THE GINKGO is actually about the interplay between tradition (the ranching culture of western Nebraska) and creativity (the student’s mind).

The excerpt:

Beyond the barn are horse corrals. A double horse trailer is parked nearby, empty, waiting, perhaps, like its intended passengers, for some excitement. Thrills are few and far between around Bodmer: branding’s bawling mayhem, a thunderhead’s explosive electric violence, a coal train derailment’s earth-shaking screaming steel rumble, all exclamation points in the essay of life along the western rivers. The rest of the story is a linear, controlled, narrative: hard work in phases bound to planetary cycles, sermons predictably focused on obedience, and a matrix of debt and credit in which all things agricultural are embedded. Only the horses seem free. I look to the north; two roans, a paint, and a dappled gray have gathered at the windmill and its overflow pool. They stomp their feet, gently, flick their tails, and stare at me, snorting.

            I try to guess which one is hers, which one used to feel her saddle thrown upon his back, her hands pulling the cinch tight around his belly, and is now longing for that familiar physical contact while she’s off in the city struggling with strange ideas. They’re like barrels, old friend, always waiting for you to try your skills at negotiating the paths around them. He pounds out of the gate, mud flying, wind whipping his mane. He feels her legs, strong, squeezing him, her boot heels digging into his ribs, her crotch slamming against his back, her quirt stinging on his flank, and her soul and spirit coursing through his blood. His slather flies; the steel bar touches his lip; in all the hurtling violence, the gentle hint of pressure seems no different from her soft strokes on his forehead; he feels her lean; the orange oil drum rings with the pop of a flying clod. Go!  Go!  Run, horse; Run!  Go!  Go!  Go, horse; Go!  Beat that goddamn Johannes girl!  Beat her ass!  Win, baby!  Win, goddamnit!  WIN!

            How can it be so fun, where you’ve gone? How can you leave me? Am I not good enough to fit between your legs and thrust with all my might at those corners you must turn to win? We can beat her; we can beat the odds and beat the time and beat the goddamn Johannes girl, if that’s what you want! Three barrels! In all these fields, in all this rain and sun and wind and snow, the gray-green prairie grass, the tiny kangaroo rats I hear beneath my feet at night, the creaking of our windmill, the frogs in our stock tank, in all this free and wonderful life we have, those three barrels are something you’ve contrived, something out of your world that we can do together! But I can also take you to the Indian graves, to the places where I know they killed the bison, for I can still smell their bones, buried in the sand! I can take you out of sight of fences, where you can sit, and think, and let your mind go back to long ago. On the far hill I see another; he’s as much of a stranger to me as his rider is to you; you don’t wear a feather; your painted hand print doesn’t mark my chest. Yet across the valley we can talk with our eyes—that ghost man with a feathered spear, and you, my rider. I can smell that other horse; his scent lingers from the last century. Don’t you feel their presence? See, these, too, are things that we can do together.

            I remember when you were small and your father first put you on my back. Then you grew up and we went chasing barrels that never moved. What were we after? I only understand tangible, solid, real things, like rocks and plants and animals. We never caught anything in the barrel races. I hate that steel trailer, but I go there only because you want me to, and I know there will be play at the end of our trip. And now you’ve gone to chase ideas. Ideas, my Mistress? What are ideas? Are they anything like the barrels? Do we need to beat the goddamn Johannes girl at ideas, too? Come home. I miss you. I stand by the well tank, watching the flies, the beetles dig in cow shit as the sun goes down, and I miss your weight, your voice, your hands. I hear the coyotes late at night, and smell the thunderheads, and then I miss your footsteps, your presence in the air. Come home. Or send for me. I can help you. Are there three ideas, as many as barrels? Come home.

            “She can’t come home, friend.”

            My voice is damped by the openness, the total lack of walls from which to echo. The words ring in my ears. I look in all directions, east and west, north and south, into the sky and down at the ground. I am the only human I see. Houses and barns are evidence that someone has been here in the past, but they could be abandoned, fossils, for all the activity around them. Only the digger bees are moving and making noise. Then from somewhere, far off in the distance, a killdeer calls. The piercing low whistle sounds wavy, as if filtered through the heat waves rising off the roadbed. The horse stomps and snorts; the others with him do the same.

            “She can never come back. She may stand with you in the pasture, and ride with you to the far horizon, but it will never be the same again.”

            It’s stupid for a grown man, a university professor, a scientist, to feel as if he’s communicating with a horse. But suddenly I know which one is hers. I walk through the wiry grass, the hard grassland legumes, until I’m standing by the fence. His eyes watch my progress. The others back away, but he waits. I have never failed to be awed by the power of large animals. Does he smell the fact that she’s been to my office? I admit the possibility; one never makes unsupported assumptions about creatures who live in worlds apart from ours. I run my hand down his forehead, my fingers through his forelock, letting the coarse hair fall over the back of my hand. He pushes at me, searching for my palm.

            “All I have are greetings, friend. And she doesn’t even know I’m here to pass them along.”

            The others come back to the fence. They can tell I’m from the city; I’m not behaving correctly. Out here, men are supposed to have a bridle in their hands if they walk up to a horse. And what follows is a secret rite of The West: Cowboy Saddles His Horse And Rides Off To Do Some Hard Work With Cattle. When I get back home, I must ask her whether she ever got to rope the calves and pull them out of the herd at branding time, whether she’s ridden this one into that dirty violence, whether she’s been allowed to occupy the second highest position in her culture: Roper at the Branding.

            Already I know the answer: No. She would never be allowed to drive her pickup along the sandy roads, down through the valley over to the Johannes place, hauling the dappled gray in a rusty red trailer with the requisite amount of litter and manure and a few dents in it, bouncing over the cattle guards along with the other three dozen neighbors, all heading for the Johannes branding. She would never get to stick that wad of snuff in her lower lip, get up on the gray, her tight sweaty leather gloves gripping the stiff rope, then ride out into the big corral, milling around with the neighbor men, swinging their loops, waiting, waiting for the herd being driven through the west pasture by neighbors.

Parasitology in the Real World

Article By: Linden Reid

There are a lot of things that come to mind when you're told that someone studies parasites. Having been there at once in my life, I can imagine some of the things that would cross the mind, but never having seen even a semblance of normal, I wouldn't be able to know all of them. I can say, now that I've crossed the bridge into parasitology, that there is a lot of truth to some of those things, but there are also a lot of misconceptions.

One thing that remains true, and that will always remain true, is that parasitologists deal with blood and guts. The nature of the beast is that we deal with animals that live inside and off of other animals. The organisms we study and dearly love can't live without that blood and those guts from the animals that live around us. So my first lesson in parasitology was that that was something that needed to be accepted - and quickly.
The other thing that not many people think about when considering parasites and their studiers is that it deals with a lot of poop. A lot of it. there are parasites that come out alive in poop, there are parasites that lay eggs in poop, and there are parasites that you can only contract by ingesting infective stages from poop. And for the first few minutes, the thought of that churns the stomach a little. But then, it's gone, and you move on. Because there are parasites to be found.
And that's what it really comes down to. Parasitologists study one of the most intricate, frustrating, beautiful, and understudied groups of animals on the planet. There are parasites that mate for life, parasites that can cloak themselves against host immune systems, and even parasites that can zombify their hosts. And we love them for all of those things and more.
So without further ado, I've wanted to walk through a day in the life of a parasitologist from the point of view of a trainee - myself. It is worth mentioning that not all parasitologists study the same hosts - not by a long shot. They study the parasites of everything; insects, trees, fish, birds, cats, people, even other parasites. I've chosen a mammal parasitologist, Dr. Scott Gardener, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for this particular example, because he is one of the most highly esteemed, highly published parasitologists in practice right now. And only partially because he was willing to let me shadow him on a day off and take excessive pictures.
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Before I begin, it's worth mentioning that there are blood, guts, and poop in this presentation. I told you that's what parasitology was all about.
The day begins early with Sherman Live traps. They're small, aluminum or steel traps that contain a lever that when stepped on will trigger the door to snap shut, trapping the animal inside. The traps are usually baited with oats or instant oatmeal, but the latter tends to turn into a cleaning problem if there happens to be rain. We let these traps sit overnight - usually they're set in the afternoon or evening, and collected early in the morning the next day.

 

The next morning, as early as possible, we troop out to retrieve our traps. They're set in lines, on this particular day of twenty each, with ten paces in between each trap. The start and finish of the lines are marked with colored flags so it's easy to see where the traps are laid, especially when you're trapping in brush. We always check which traps have animals in them, and number and label those specifically. On a great day in Nebraska, you'll get animals in about 10% of your traps - but that's not always the case. On this particular day, we set out around 150 traps, and got 9 animals.

When we're back in the lab, we press down the levers on the traps, and upend the animals into plastic bags. We have to be careful of this process, because many of the animals that we trap have the potential to carry Hantavirus, among other things. We also want to catch any ectoparasites that are hanging onto the skin and fur of the animals that we trapped. Once we have them in the bag, a chemical (and several can be used) is injected into the bag, and the animal is euthanized from the fumes. This process takes less than five minutes, and is the least stressful process for the animal possible. When the animal is dead, we have a specimen to begin processing.

The first thing to be done is measurements. Without host data, the parasites are nearly useless to the parasitologist, and in parasitology, the host is as important as the parasite itself. Four common measurements are taken for the animals that we trapped ( all of our animals were white-footed mice, Peromyscus leucopus) - the length of a hind foot, the length of the ear, the length of the animal from the tip of the nose to the base of the tail, and the length of the tail. After that, the animal is weighed and blood smears are taken to look for any blood parasites that might be present. The bag that contained the animal is emptied and preserved to be searched through later for ectoparasites. The mammal is given a unique number, and this number is associated with the host and all its parasites for the data that's collected.

At this point, the animal is ready to be examined for endoparasites living inside the body. Once a single incision down the length of the body is made, samples are taken from the spleen, liver, kidneys, and sometimes several other organs for preservation in liquid nitrogen to use for genetic work. The intestines, stomach, cecum (a digestive organ used for absorption of fluids), liver, and often lungs are set aside to be checked for parasites. The animal is then either saved whole for use in a mammalogy study, or skinned for depositing in a museum. If the animal is skinned, the skull is often removed for skeletonization, along with the rest of the skeleton if the museum or researcher does not have one in the official collection for research reference.

Now we look through the organs that we removed for parasites. Each one is isolated separately and carefully cut open, as the parasites inside are often very fragile. If we find parasites, which we did today, we set them aside in saline and preserve them differently depending on which kind of parasite we've found. We found plenty of nematodes (round worms) today, which are relaxed in glacial acetic acid, and then preserved in 70% ethanol.

Once we have everything properly preserved, we can work on the most rewarding part of the process - identifying what we've found. The nematodes that we found today haven't been identified yet, but in the past few days we've found Trichuris peromysci, Syphacia peromysci, both nematodes, Catenotaenia peromysci, a cestode (tapeworm), and Cuterebra castrator, a bot fly larvae, all in the same host species as we caught today (Peromyscus leucopus). We also found several bot fly larvae today that were identified as Cuterebra castrator.

Once we're done processing animals and all of our specimens are identified and properly deposited into museums (though sometimes the identification and depositing comes later), we get to go home for the day with a few more lessons in parasitology and usually a new lesson in life.
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Sometimes it's something as simple as remembering to never, ever forget to bring sunscreen with you whenever you're outside, and sometimes it can be something as significant as truly understanding what it means to have another life in your hands.
Parasites are pretty great. To those who study them, they're more than pretty great. There are parts to studying parasitology that are dirty, exhausting, and sad. But there are even more parts to parasitology that are beautiful, mind-boggling, and important, many of which have spawned some of the greatest ideas in biology in hundreds of years. And that is why we study them.
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I'd like to give a special thanks to Cedar Point Biological Station, and especially Jon Garbisch for allowing me to take photographs of this Field Parasitology class. This class is offered every summer our at Cedar Point, just outside of Ogallala, Nebraska. It's a worthwhile class, not only for those interested in parasitology, but for those interested in the more general sciences as well.
I would also like to thank the Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology and Dr. Scott Gardner for providing their expertise and equipment for this article. I cannot thank you enough for the help you've given.

Visit and support Cedar Point Biological Station here:

http://biosci.unl.edu/cedar-point-biological-station

and visit and support the Manter Lab here:

http://hwml.unl.edu/

A new direction for CPBS ... Art on the Prairie

New for summer 2014 CPBS and the UNL Department of Art and Art History will offer PHOT 161. The instructor Allen Morris has told me this is essentially a digital landscape photography course for non-majors. It is integrated into the regular Cedar Point sessions, 2nd session in this case June 8-27, 2014. One difference is it will be 3 credits instead of our normal 4 for all classes at CPBS. PHOT 161 will be offered along with another new course by Dennis Ferraro; NRES 374 Field Herpetology (learn more in a soon to be posted blog). Room and Board costs will be the same as our other courses; $575 for 3 weeks. It is also an ACE7 course so I hope many biology and natural history majors will be interested in enrolling.

The art department faculty are very excited about offering this class and hope to offer at least one class at Cedar Point for many more summers. The art course offering in 2015 may not be PHOT 161 so if you really want to take this course at CPBS I would grab this opportunity. Like all other CPBS courses we will open an internal enrollment roster the first week of November, 2013.  I believe enrollment will be limited to around 15 students so if your really want in, see us in November!

Western Nebraska and Nebraska Sandhills landscapes are spectacular so this is not the PHOT 161 offered on campus.

TELL your friends!

Jon Garbisch

The course description including requirements from Allen Morris follows below:

Arapaho Prairie-One of the many beautiful areas available for class field work.

ART @ Cedar Point Biological Station, Ogallala NE – Summer 2014 – PHOT161

June 8 – 27, 2014

The Basics:

In PHOT161, students will learn digital photographic techniques in order to express ideas that are informed by an introduction to historical and contemporary work and concepts in photography.

During our three-week course students will explore Cedar Point Biological Station and the surrounding areas in order to learn about photographic composition, light quality, and color. Students will learn how to use manual controls on their digital SLR cameras to capture high quality images of subjects of their choosing. 

Students will learn how to import and manage their digital photograph files using Adobe Lightroom Software and will learn how to select and, using basic editing techniques, prepare their photographs for screen display and archival printing. 

The class will also discuss contemporary photographers and provide a historical foundation of the medium to inform and influence the work that our students will create. 

Goals include: informal collaborations with others in residence at CPBS; topics that address regional issues, such as the visualization of rural life, environmental recording, creative documentation processing, seeing the world differently; the opportunity to be a creative researcher  in an immersive experience amid natural surroundings.

Finally, students will engage in rigorous critiques of technical acuity, concept strength, and analysis of photographic imagery in order to grow artistically, make stronger images as they progress, and develop a dialogue with other class members that can sustain them for future artistic endeavors.

The Requirements:

All students who enroll in PHOT161 will be required to have the following:

• A Digital Single Lens Reflex Camera with Full Manual Controls and RAW capture capability.

• Proper Batteries and Memory Cards for their Camera.

• Computer with Adobe Lightroom Software. (a 30 Day trial can be downloaded just before class starts so that students do not have to incur the cost of the software immediately)

• Textbook: A Short Course in Digital Photography by Barbara London and Jim Stone.

Final Thoughts:

We are very excited to offer this opportunity to create art works at the Cedar Point Biological Station to students interested in learning more about Photography. This course offers the possibility of photographing in a new location with new perspectives that will help students make deeply meaningful images. It allows students to engage in a focused dialogue with Photography and will provide a great way to learn more about how to effectively use their camera equipment to express ideas and thoughts in a completely artistic way.

Catch of the Day: Tapeworms and Trichurids

Article By Johnica Morrow

 

Tapeworms from Crotalus viridus

The second day of our 4th session here at Cedar Point was quite eventful for our Field Parasitology class.  The class performed a necropsy on a rattlesnake (Crotalus viridus) that was caught last Sunday morning by the Associate Director, Jon Garbish.  The class had certainly hoped to find parasites in this animal...a cestode, a nematode, a pentastome perhaps...but they had no idea just how lucky this catch had been.  As students gazed in anticipation, the intestines of the snake began to reveal a crowd of tapeworms.  The students watched in blissful wonder as their professor, Dr. Scott Gardner, carefully extracted these cestodes.  So far the class has been able to determine that these tapeworms belong to the order Proteocephalidea within the class Cestoda (which is under the phylum Platyhelminthes).  Over the course of the next few days, students will learn how these tapeworms are prepared, preserved, and identified.  

Tapeworms weren't the only thing crawling around in room 101 of the Gainsforth Resource Center.  The class also discovered four other types of worms from mammals they had collected, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. To collect parasites, one must first collect their hosts.  Keeping this in mind, students set out yesterday evening to attempt to catch small rodents in order to examine them for parasites.  As a class, the students set out 160 Sherman traps in lines that radiated through the main campus of the station.  Upon checking these traps this morning, the students found and processed 19 animals.  They caught voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus) and deer mice (Peromyscus leucopus).  So far, none of the students have documented the presence of parasites from their voles, but many types of helminths were recorded from the deer mice.  Today, these mice yielded whipworms (Trichuris peromysci), pinworms (Syphacia peromysci), tapeworms (Catenotaenia peromysci), and bot flies (Cuterebra castrator).

Dr. Scott Gardner holding
the rattlesnake's tapeworms.

These great findings seem all the more impressive when one realizes that this work was done in a single class period.  The class is off to a great start with two days of this session down.  Students are learning that setting traps, performing necropsies, preparing specimens, and identifying species is all in a day's work for a field parasitologist!  

One of the most exciting things about field-based classes are their fluidity.  To properly teach a class in a field setting the students and the instructor have to be prepared to roll with the punches.  You never know what sorts of biodiversity you will be working with from day to day when you are collecting any sorts of animals, especially internal and external parasites.  It will be interesting to see what the next few weeks will bring!