A Living Laboratory
Professors and students conduct important fieldwork on Colby’s Island Campus
A growing number of professors are prowling the woods, fields, ponds, and shoreline of Allen Island, utilizing the Island Campus as a living laboratory where they and their students seek answers to a wide variety of questions.
For them, it provides a remarkable opportunity to do research in a unique island ecosystem with a broad assortment of flora and fauna.
The Island Campus also offers reliable access to research sites and infrastructure like electricity and lab and classroom workspace, things that are important but not always guaranteed for scientists doing fieldwork. Having them in place makes everything easier, according to Cathy Bevier, Oak Professor of Biology, who is wrapping up a multi-year research project looking at amphibian health.
“Knowing that your study system is intact from year to year gives you a lot of insights, and we’re able to leave things and know that they’re in safe hands,” she said, adding that the island itself is also unique. “It’s isolated. The environment out there is just terrific, and our research and teaching is very student-centered. I always enjoy taking students out there, especially for the first time, and seeing their awe and wonder of the beauty.”
A busy summer
Even before the College acquired Allen and Benner islands in 2022, students and professors had been going there to study things as diverse as climate change, frogs, and island soundscapes. Activity picked up dramatically after the College started carrying out its mission to build a dynamic Island Campus that would be a center for learning, research, and creative inspiration.
This summer, more than 2,500 people went to the Island Campus, said Whitney King, the Dr. Frank and Theodora Miselis Professor of Chemistry.
“The calendar’s crazy,” he said.
Along with faculty researchers, the island welcomed visitors that included alumni, Audubon birders, area teachers, students, the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, and participants in the Colby Achievement Program in the Sciences.
Altogether, it makes for a robust community of learning that uses the whole island as a classroom.
The secrets of tree swallows
Tree swallows, a type of insectivorous bird that feeds exclusively on the wing, are particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change. Unusual weather conditions such as extreme rain or cold can disrupt the habits of the insects that make up their diet, and the swallows have even starved to death because of such weather events.
Anna Forsman, assistant professor of biology and an ecological immunologist, wants to set up both a site to accommodate fieldwork with the tree swallows and a small, basic molecular biology lab that will allow scientists to process the samples collected there.
Toward this goal, she installed 23 tree swallow nesting boxes on the island in the spring and was delighted that one already had occupants this summer.
A tree swallow yells from one of the new nesting boxes on Allen Island.
“I think it’s really exciting that they used it, and I’ll be excited to see what happens next year,” she said.
Once the birds move in, she and her students will screen small samples of blood for avian malaria and previous and current exposure to various diseases. But that’s not all they’ll do. A major aspect of their work involves something she calls “fecal forensics,” or extracting and sequencing DNA from fecal samples.
“They’re easy to collect, especially from chicks. You pick the chicks up, and they poop almost immediately. If you’re ready with a sterile contraption, you can collect those samples. And once you extract DNA, there’s just a wealth of information,” Forsman said. “We use the DNA to characterize diet composition so we can figure out what the birds are actually eating. I think that what’s going to be interesting over time is to see how that changes because insect populations are changing so much.”
Knowing exactly what’s on the swallows’ menu provides a big piece of information, but it’s not the whole picture—the birds may not eat all of the insects that are available. So over the next couple of years, Forsman is hoping to set up something that will: a device called a bug sucker, which she had used while doing her doctoral work at Cornell University.
“It’s a big pole, basically a tower, that literally sucks bugs out of the air,” she said.
The bug sucker takes constant samples of insects flying at the same altitude as the foraging birds. With it and fecal forensics, she and her students will learn more about the insects available, the insects the swallows eat, and how efficient the birds are at selecting their dinners.
“That’s something I’m really looking forward to,” Forsman said.
Finding out more about frogs
Bevier and her students are finishing a six-year study of amphibian health, in which they compared the health of populations of green frogs located in Waterville, Unity, and on Allen Island.
The work is important because frog populations are declining, in part because many species are threatened by a deadly infectious disease. It’s called chytridiomycosis, and it is caused by an aquatic fungus.
Bevier was intrigued to learn that not all frogs that contracted the disease ended up dying.
“Just as with Covid, you could be infected and be asymptomatic. With chytrid, frogs could have this as part of their skin microbiome and show no outward signs of distress,” she said.
She was curious about how the disease was affecting island frogs, a more isolated population. Green frogs were introduced on Allen Island around 20 years ago after an ecologically minded island worker relocated young green frogs from a mainland pond that was destined to be bulldozed and turned into a housing development. a
“Now they’ve populated every freshwater pond,” Bevier said.
Over the years of the study, she and her students caught frogs during the breeding season, then swabbed them to learn more about their microbiome, the community of bacteria and fungi that lives on their skin and plays a key role in their health. They measured the frogs, took photos of them, and noted the intensity of their skin color. They also took recordings of individual frog mating calls.
They’re doing all of this because they want to learn more about the frogs that seem to be resistant to the disease. “The question is, what is it about them that allows this tolerance? Why doesn’t chytrid overtake their immune system, and are there sub-lethal effects of having an infection?” she asked.
Now she has a big database that should help her answer the questions, and students have hands-on field biology experience that will enrich their classroom and lab work and give them an idea of future career pursuits. That means a lot, Bevier and Forsman said.
“I love that they’ll do everything from start to finish and see how it’s all connected,” Forsman said. “I feel like that’s where a lot of the spark hits.”
