NIMBioS Working Group: Expanding Data Nuggets by Developing and Assessing this Integrative Resource to Increase Quantitative Literacy

On January 7-9th at NIMBioS headquarters in Knoxville, TN, the Data Nuggets working group brought together a diverse team of leaders in curriculum reform (K-12 and undergraduate), education resource assessment, education researchers, mathematicians, biologists, and a high school teacher. This working group served as a mechanism to bring NIMBioS resources and leaders in science education research and reform together in an effort to develop a national resource focused on integrating mathematics and science, particularly in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology. The group has three objectives:

Identify skills necessary for progression towards quantitative literacy and discuss the role of Data Nuggets in acquiring these skills
Assess the efficacy of Data Nuggets as an educational tool
Build a library of resources for use alongside Data Nuggets in undergraduate classrooms

The group discussed common difficulties experienced by students when performing tasks that merge science content with quantitative skills, and how Data Nuggets can alleviate these difficulties. Based on these discussions, our next steps are to identify specific quantitative skills we want students to develop by using Data Nuggets. These learning outcomes will inform the development of a preliminary assessment tool that we will use to examine student gains after using Data Nuggets. Additionally, we hope to extend Data Nuggets to the undergraduate classroom and will be piloting Data Nuggets in introductory biology and math courses. We will organize professional development sessions for faculty to learn about and create Data Nuggets.

Meeting 1 participants (L to R): Louise Mead, Melissa Kjelvik, Molly Stuhlsatz, Laurel Hartley, Julie Morris, Paul Strode, Kristin Jenkins, Elizabeth Schultheis, Jeremy Wojdak, Ariel Cintron-Arias, Robert Mayes, Gordon Uno.

12.10.14

Blog Post on the Molecular Ecologist

Data Nuggets were featured on the Molecular Ecologist blog. Article is reproduced below, and can be found on their blog here.

Increase your broader impacts with Data Nuggets

This week we have a special guest post by Elizabeth Schultheis, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University and the Kellogg Biological Station, to describe her Data Nuggets project. Data Nuggets is a great way to invest in the scientific community of the future by making research accessible to K-12 educators and students in new and exciting ways.

Broader impacts can be hard.

We’ve all had that moment while writing an NSF grant proposal where we have to discuss the broader impacts of our research and demonstrate that our work contributes to society. The NSF makes it clear that they highly value projects with significant broader impacts; grants that do not explicitly address them will be returned without review, and some reviewers give them equal weight to the intellectual merit of a project when making funding decisions. Additionally, it is no longer enough to train undergraduates when performing our research, or TA a course where we discuss our research. The NSF is looking for creative answers to their call for projects that both improve our understanding of science and benefit society.

But they don’t have to be.

Data Nuggets were designed to help scientists improve their communication skills and share the story of their research with a broad audience. When creating a Data Nugget you increase your broader impacts by:

Improving STEM education at all levels, including K-12 and undergraduate classrooms
Increasing your public outreach by disseminating your research findings to a broad audience and putting your data into a format that nonscientists can understand
Making science relatable by sharing your journey of exploration and discovery with students, increasing the passion for science and retention in STEM fields
Providing a snippet of data from your research, allowing students to analyze and interpret messy, real data as opposed to the polished data in textbooks that is not a realistic outcome of experimentation
Showing students that scientists are not all old men in lab coats, but can be done in a variety of settings by anyone with a passion for the natural world

What are Data Nuggets?

Data Nuggets are worksheets that bring data collected by scientists into the classroom, giving students the chance to work with real data – and all its complexities. By working with real data, students practice interpreting quantitative information and making claims based on evidence. The standard format of each Nugget provides a brief background to a researcher and their study system along with a small, manageable dataset. Students are challenged to answer a scientific question, use the dataset to support their claim, and construct graphs to facilitate data interpretation. Because of their simplicity and flexibility, Data Nuggets can be used throughout the school year as students build confidence in their science and quantitative skills.

Making your own Data Nugget

So what do you need to do to make a Data Nugget from your own research? Basically, you need to tell a story about your research and the process that lead you to your ideas and questions. This story should be written in a very accessible format, leaving out jargon or unnecessary complicated subjects. With this story you share a small dataset from your work, and a short description of your interpretation of these findings to help teachers discuss this topic with students in class.

We have detailed instructions available on our website to guide you through the steps of making a Data Nugget. Use our template to guide you through each simple step. We also have presentation slides and some cool resources in case you’re feeling stuck and need some inspiration. We are so excited to help you create a Data Nugget of your own; please contact Liz (eschultheis@gmail.com) or Melissa (kjelvikm@gmail.com) if you have any questions!

Future of Data Nuggets

Our next step for Data Nuggets is to formally assess improvements in student learning and attitudes about science when using these worksheets as part of their curriculum. We hope that soon scientists who create Data Nuggets will not only be able to say they have created a resource that is used in classrooms across the country, but that they are part of a project that improves students’ scientific understanding and comfort using quantitative data to answer questions.

For updates on Data Nuggets, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter! Our first journal publication is coming out in the American Biology Teacher in their January 2015 issue.

10.24.14

Shooting the poop

The activities are as follows:

Imagine walking through a forest in the middle of summer. You can hear birds chirping, a slight breeze rustling the leaves, and a faint pinging noise like rain. However, what you hear is not rain – it is the sound of millions of forest insects pooping!

If we look closer to see who is making all this frass (insect poop) you’ll notice there are tons of caterpillars amongst the leaves. You might see caterpillars eating plants and hiding from predators. Some caterpillars might camouflage themselves, while others build shelters from leaves to avoid being seen. Others are brightly colored to warn predators that they have chemicals that make them taste awful.

The silver-spotted skipper is a caterpillar that lives in the forest. They have a variety of defense strategies against enemies, including building leaf shelters for protection. For these insects, the sight and smell of poop might alert predators that there is a tasty meal nearby. Usually caterpillars keep moving and leave their frass behind, but this species builds shelters and isn’t able to keep moving because they need their shelters for protection.

Martha is a behavioral biologist who studies these insects. While raising silver-spotted skipper caterpillars in the lab, Martha noticed that they were making a pinging noise in their containers. Upon further observation, she discovered that they “shoot their poop”, sometimes launching their frass over 1.5m! Martha wanted to figure out why these caterpillars might have this very strange behavior. Perhaps launching their frass is a way to avoid being found by predators.

To evaluate whether the smell of frass helps predators find and locate silver-spotted skippers, Martha conducted an experiment with a wasp predator that eats these caterpillars. She allowed two silver-spotted skippers to build shelters on a leaf and then carefully removed the caterpillars. She then inserted 6 frass pellets into one of the shelters, and 6 beads designed to look like frass but with no smell (control treatment) into the other shelter. She placed the leaf with the two shelters in a cage containing an actively foraging wasp colony (n = 10 wasps). She recorded how many times the wasps visited each shelter (control beads or frass) and how much time the wasps spent exploring each shelter. She expected wasps would spend more time exploring the shelters with the frass than they would the control shelters.

Featured scientist: Martha Weiss from Georgetown University. Written by Kylee Grenis.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.6

Additional teacher resources related to this Data Nugget include:

The paper published using this data and testing alternative hypotheses: Weiss, M. R. (2003) Good housekeeping: why do shelter-dwelling caterpillars fling their frass? Ecology Letters 6(4): 361–370

YouTube videos of the silver-spotted skipper (Epargyreus clarus) “shooting its poop” (aka. ballistic defecation). These videos would be great to show in class after students have read the Research Background section to help engage them with the system.

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10.3.14

Student guide for reading a scientific paper

Graduate student Kylee Grenis from the University of Denver has developed a guide for students to help them read the primary literature. A PDF of her guide How to read a scientific paper can be found on our Resources page!

How to Read a Scientific Paper

As your scientific career begins to blossom, you will need to incorporate an understanding of the scientific literature into your lab report. Academic sources are considered to be reputable because they go through an extensive peer-review process to determine whether there is scientific merit and proper methodology to support the claims of the study. Wikipedia does not have this extensive process, which is why it is not acceptable to cite this source in your lab reports.

A scientific paper is ranked in importance based on the number of times it is cited, meaning how many other papers reference it within their own text. Papers that are cited hundreds of times are considered to be foundational papers in the field. Papers that are cited only once or twice will tend to be very specific or were published recently. You may need to rely on both foundational papers and more recent works to write a lab report.

Understanding Articles

It can be really intimidating to read primary literature. Scientists like to use a lot of jargon that is specific to their field and bring up theories you may not be familiar with. But, once you slow down and take the time to really dig into the article, you can find a lot of useful information and inspiration as well as additional relevant papers to read. When you really concentrate on an article, it should take you at least an hour to read. Think of each journal article as a textbook chapter. Even though an article may be only 12 pages long, it will have a lot of information to sort through.

When I read a journal article, I keep a notebook close by to write down my thoughts, define terms, and record key findings. This way I have a record of papers I’ve read and I can quickly go back and find out what that paper was about. Here is my methodology for reading a journal article.

Going Through a Scientific Paper

Abstract

Articles include an abstract for a reason. Abstracts give a quick overview of the paper’s topic, methods, and findings. However, it is not a great idea to solely read abstracts in place of the entire paper. You’ll find more information, and gain a better understanding of how scientists think and convey their findings, by reading the entire paper. Besides, if you never practice reading articles, it will never get easier.

Question 1: While reading the abstract, see if you can determine what the author’s hypothesis/hypotheses are.
Question 2: Identify the general findings. These are important to keep in mind as you delve into the paper.

Introduction

The introduction of the paper should have an overview of the general principles, hypotheses, or theories, tested in the study. It should also explain why they are using the particular organism or system of study. Lastly, it should include the hypotheses tested.

In addition to introducing key concepts to frame the rest of the paper, the introduction will have lots of terminology used throughout the article. If there are any terms you do not understand, look them up now as you will probably see them again. It will save you lots of strife and increase your vocabulary.

The introduction is also a great place to find additional sources. Because introductions introduce key theories and study systems, they can be great resources for finding both more general and more specific information.

Question 3: While reading the introduction, identify general theory explanations, study systems, hypotheses and/or predictions.
Question 4: Define any terms you do not already know.
Question 5: Highlight two additional sources you would look up for more information.

Methods

The methods section should cover locations, dates, details of experimental design, and statistical analyses used. Scientific studies generally fall into two camps: observational or manipulative studies. Observational studies do not manipulate any variables; they rely on existing natural variation to find relationships between variables. Experimental studies use controlled manipulations to determine relationships between the independent and dependent variables. The methods section will also outline statistical analyses used to determine these relationships. Do not be scared by the statistics! Just realize that these are tests the author uses to find whether the relationship between the independent and dependent variable is statistically real or if it is a function of random chance.

Question 6: Highlight where and when the experiment was conducted.
Question 7: Determine the type of study. Is it observational or manipulative? Does this determine the experimental design used?

Results

The results section is what you have been waiting for! This section shows the results of the study through the statistical analyses. Note that there are no interpretations of the data. The results section should simply report the data. The author will describe the results of the statistical analyses by reporting the test statistic (a number calculated from the data to determine the p-value; it varies between statistical tests), the number of independent data points (degrees of freedom or df), and the p-value (significance value). P-values of less than 0.05 are considered to be significant.

Additionally, take a look at the figures. The figures will be a graphical representation of the data. You may already be familiar with a few types of common graphs. A scatter plot will show the relationship between a continuous independent variable and a continuous dependent variable; continuous variables have variable limits, like the temperature outside. Scatter plots with a best-fit line are common with regression statistical analyses.

Another graph you are probably familiar with is the bar graph. Bar graphs show the relationship between a categorical independent variable and a continuous dependent variable; categorical variables are those where data points are grouped. For example, different treatment groups, like fertilized or non-fertilized, would be categorical while plant measurements, like number of leaves or plant height, would be continuous. Statistical tests that commonly use bar graphs to report data are the t-test and ANalyses Of VAriance (ANOVA).

Question 8: Determine the statistical tests reported in the results. Does this match with those from the methods section?
Question 9: Look at the figures. Determine the independent and dependent variables. Are they continuous or categorical? How can you tell?
Question 10: Find each figure citation (e.g. Fig. 1) in the text of the results section. Does the text match what the figure shows?

Discussion

The discussion section will interpret the results of the data and place them in the greater context of the research done in this field. You can think of the discussion section as a joining of the introduction section and the results section. The discussion should mention whether the results support or do not support the hypotheses. If the data does support the hypotheses, the authors should delve into why this is important, how it relates to other studies, and the implications of the findings. Note that the authors will refer back to figures and tables from the results section to support their claims. If the data does not support the hypotheses, the authors will delve into why this is important, how it relates to other studies, and the implications of the findings. Even if the data do not support the original hypotheses, it is still important and interesting!

Question 11: Determine whether the hypothesis was supported or refuted.
Question 12: Look at the references back to the results section. Do the figures support the claims and interpretations of the authors?
Question 13: Think all the way back to the abstract. After reading the entire article, does the abstract give an accurate picture of the entire study?

Think About It

Once you have a pretty clear idea about the main points of the article, look at other papers that cite the article. You can scan the new article to find the original article citation and double-check your interpretation.

Think About It Tip 1: Did the citing authors reach the same conclusions you did? If not, what did they find most important?
Think About It Tip 2: Do you agree with their interpretation?
Think About It Tip 3: Think about your own study. How will this article help you support your hypotheses or your results?

9.25.14

Sexy smells

Danielle holding a male junco. Notice the white tail feathers.

The activities are as follows:

Animals collect information about each other and the rest of the world using multiple senses, including sight, sound, and smell. They use this information to decide what to eat, where to live, and who to pick as a mate. Choosing a mate is an important decision that requires a lot of information, such as how healthy a potential partner is, and information about their genes. Mate quality can affect how many offspring an animal has and if their genes will get passed on to the next generation.

Danielle removing preen oil from a junco.

Many male birds have brightly colored feathers that are attractive to females. For example, the peacock has bright and elaborate tail feathers that are thought to communicate a male’s quality to the females. Besides using their sense of sight to see feathers, female birds may use their other senses to gather information about potential mates as well. Danielle is a biologist and she wanted to figure out if birds use vision and their other senses, such as smell, to determine the quality of potential mates.

Danielle decided to research how dark-eyed juncos communicate through their sense of sight and smell. Dark-eyed juncos are a type of sparrow. They are not colorful birds like peacocks, but they do have bright white feathers in their tails. Male dark-eyed juncos have more tail-white than females. Danielle thought is possible that females use the amount of white in a male’s tail to determine whether he is a high quality mate. Danielle was also interested in several chemical compounds found in junco preen oil, which birds spread on their feathers. This preen oil contains compounds that give birds their odor. Danielle found that males and females have different odors! Just as males have more white in their tail feathers, they also produce more of a chemical called 2-pentadecanone. Danielle wanted to test whether this chemical functioned as a signal to females of mate quality.

A preen gland where birds produce preen oil.

To test her two potential hypotheses, Danielle captured male juncos at Mountain Lake Biological Station in Virginia. She measured the amount of tail-white by estimating the proportion of each tail feather that was white, and adding up the values from each feather. She also took preen oil samples and measured the percent of each sample that was made up of 2-pentadecanone. She followed these birds for one breeding season to find out how many offspring they had. If females pick mates based on visual ornaments, then she predicted males with more tail-white would have more offspring. If females pick mates based on smell, then she predicted males with more 2-pentadecanone would have more offspring.

Featured scientist: Danielle Whittaker from Michigan State University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.4

Additional classroom resources for this Data Nugget:

To learn more about Danielle’s work with juncos, see her blog posts “The sweet smell of (reproductive) success” and “Deciphering avian aromas” on the BEACON website.
To learn more about Danielle and her research, check out this episode from the PBS/NOVA web series “The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers” where she was featured.
A NYTimes article about Danielle’s recent collaboration with a microbial biologist to determine what creates the junco smell, “The Bacterial Surprise in This Bird’s Smell“.
There is a scientific paper associated with the data in this Data Nugget. The citation and PDF for the paper is below.
- Whittaker, D., N.M. Gerlach, H.A. Soinic, M.V. Novotnyc, and E.D. Ketterson (2013) Bird odour predicts reproductive success. Animal Behaviour 86(4): 697-703

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9.15.14

Data Nugget survey for teachers!

We have created a survey “Data Nuggets in the Classroom” to help get an estimate of how many teachers are currently using Data Nuggets, and to get teacher feedback on this educational resource. We are very interested in what Data Nuggets can add to your existing curriculum and any gains in quantitative reasoning or excitement for science you may have observed in your students since using Nuggets.

To participate in the survey, please click here!

Thank you for participating!

8.13.14

Dangerous Aquatic Prey: Can Predators Adapt to Toxic Algae?

Figure 1: Scientist Finiguerra collecting copepods at the New Jersey experimental site.

The activities are as follows:

Phytoplankton are microscopic algae that form the base of all aquatic food chains. While organisms can safely eat most phytoplankton, some produce toxins. When these toxic algae reach high population levels it is known as a toxic algal bloom. These blooms are occurring more and more often across the globe – a worrisome trend! Toxic algae poison animals that eat them, and in turn, humans that eat these animals. For example, clams and other shellfish filter out large quantities of the toxic algae, and the toxic cells accumulate in their tissues. If humans then eat these contaminated shellfish they can become very sick, and even die.

One reason the algae produce toxins is to reduce predation. However, if predators feed on toxic prey for many generations, the predator population may evolve resistance, by natural selection, to the toxic prey. In other words, the predators may adapt and would be able to eat lots of toxic prey without being poisoned. Copepods, small crustaceans and the most abundant animals in the world, are main consumers of toxic algae. Along the northeast coast of the US, there is a toxic phytoplankton species, Alexandrium fundyense, which produces very toxic blooms. Blooms of Alexandrium occur often in Maine, but are never found in New Jersey. Scientists wondered if populations of copepods that live Maine were better at coping with this toxic prey compared to copepods from New Jersey.

Figure 2: A photograph of a copepod (left) and the toxic alga Alexandrium sp. (right).

Scientists tested whether copepod populations that have a long history of exposure to toxic Alexandrium are adapted to this toxic prey. To do this, they raised copepods from Maine (long history of exposure to toxic Alexandrium) and New Jersey (no exposure to toxic Alexandrium) in the laboratory. They raised all the copepods under the same conditions. The copepods reproduced and several generations were born in the lab (a copepod generation is only about a month). This experimental design eliminated differences in environmental influences (temperature, salinity, etc.) from where the populations were originally from.

The scientists then measured how fast the copepods were able to produce eggs, also called their egg production rate. Egg production rate is an estimate of growth and indicates how well the copepods can perform in their environment. The copepods were given either a diet of toxic Alexandrium or another diet that was non-toxic. If the copepods from Maine produced more eggs while eating Alexandrium, this would be evidence that copepods have adapted to eating the toxic algae. The non-toxic diet was a control to make sure the copepods from Maine and New Jersey produced similar amounts of eggs while eating a good food source. For example, if the copepods from New Jersey always lay fewer eggs, regardless of good or bad food, then the control would show that. Without the control, it would be impossible to tell if a difference in egg production between copepod populations was due to the toxic food or something else.

Featured scientists: Michael Finiguerra and Hans Dam from University of Connecticut-Avery Point, and David Avery from the Maine Maritime Academy

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.6

There are three scientific papers associated with the data in this Data Nugget. The citations and PDFs of the papers are below.

Colin, SP and HG Dam (2002) Latitudinal differentiation in the effects of the toxic dinoflagellate Alexandrium spp. on the feeding and reproduction of populations of the copepod Acartia hudsonica. Harmful Algae 1:113-125

Colin, SP and HG Dam (2004) Testing for resistance of pelagic marine copepods to a toxic dinoflagellate. Evolutionary Ecology 18:355-377

Colin, SP and HG Dam (2007) Comparison of the functional and numerical responses of resistant versus non-resistant populations of the copepod Acartia hudsonica fed the toxic dinoflagellate Alexandrium tamarense. Harmful Algae 6:875-882

6.9.14

Marvelous mud

You can tell that the mud in this picture is high in organic matter because it is dark brown and mucky (in real life you’d be able to smell it, too!)

The activities are as follows:

The goopy, mucky, often stinky mud at the bottom of a wetland or lake is a very important part of the ecosystem. Wetland mud is much more than just wet dirt. For example, many species of microbes live in the wetland mud where they decompose (breakdown) dead plant and animal material to obtain energy. This dead plant and animal material is called organic matter. However, the wetland mud microbes do not have all the oxygen they need to decompose the plant and animal tissues quickly and efficiently. Because of this, the dead material in wetland mud decomposes much more slowly than similar dead material in dry soil.

A successful core! You can see that the tube has mud, as well as some of the water from the wetland that was on top of the mud.

As a graduate student, Lauren became fascinated with wetland mud and its interesting properties. She wanted to know how important all the mud and its organic matter is for wetlands. By talking with other members of her lab and reading scientific papers, Lauren learned that wetland mud can often be high in the element phosphorus and that phosphorus acts as a fertilizer for plants, including wetland plants and algae. However, nutrients, such as phosphorus can build up in wetland mud. Lauren thought it might be possible that the organic matter in the mud was the source of all the phosphorus in some wetlands. She predicted that wetlands with more organic matter would have more phosphorus. If her data support her hypothesis, it could mean that organic matter is very important for wetlands, because nutrients are needed for algae and plants to grow.

Although most mud is high in organic matter and nutrients, not all mud is the same. There is natural variation in the amount of organic matter and nutrients from place to place. Even within the same location mud can be very different in spots. Lauren used this variability to test her ideas. She measured organic matter and phosphorus in mud from 16 freshwater locations (four lakes, five ponds, and seven wetlands). She took cores that allowed her to sample mud deep into the ground. She then brought her cores back to the lab and measured organic matter and phosphorus levels in her samples.

Featured scientist: Lauren Kinsman-Costello from Kent State University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.8

More photos associated with this research can be found here. There is one scientific paper associated with the data in this Data Nugget. The citation and PDF of the paper is below:

Kinsman-Costello LE, J O’Brien, SK Hamilton (2014) Re-flooding a Historically Drained Wetland Leads to Rapid Sediment Phosphorus Release. Ecosystems 17:641-656

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6.6.14

Fish fights

A male in his territory (front) and an intruding male (back)

The activities are as follows:

In many animals, males fight for territories. Getting a good territory and making sure other males don’t steal it is very important! Males use these territories to attract females for mating. The males that get the best territories are more likely to mate with females and have more babies. Only the males that have babies will pass on their genes to the next generation.

Stickleback fish use the shallow bottom areas of lakes to mate. Male stickleback fish fight each other to gain the best territories in this habitat. In their territories, males build a nest out of sand, aquatic plants, and glue they produce from their kidneys. The better the nest, the more females a male can attract. Males then use courtship dances to attract females to their nests. If a female likes a male, she will deposit her eggs in his nest. Then the male will care for those eggs and protect the offspring that hatch.

Scientist Alycia out in the field collecting male stickleback fish for her experiments

Alycia is a scientist who is interested in understanding what makes a male stickleback a good fighter and defender of his territory. Perhaps more aggressive males are better at defending their territory and nests because they are better at fighting off other males. She used sticklebacks she collected from British Columbia to test her hypothesis.

In her experiment, 24 males were kept in 6 large tanks, with 4 males in each tank. Alycia watched each of the 24 males every day for 10 days. She recorded the behaviors of each fish when they were competing for territories, defending their territory, and building their nests. She also recorded the size of the males’ territories and whether they had a nest each day.

Featured scientist: Alycia R. Lackey from Michigan State University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 7.7

More news on Alycia’s work on stickleback fish can be found at her BEACON blog post, “Making and Breaking a Species.”

A male (right) defending his territory from another fish (left).

6.6.14

Which guy should she choose?

A male stickleback tending his nest. Notice the male’s bright red throat, blue eye, and blue-green body.

The activities are as follows:

In many animals, males use complex behaviors to attract females. They use displays to show off colorful parts of their bodies, like feathers or scales. For example, male peacocks fan out and shake their colorful tails to attract female attention. These displays take up a lot of energy, and yet some males are unable to attract any females while other males attract many females.

In stickleback fish, males are very colorful to attract females. Their throats turn bright red during the spring when they mate. Stickleback males also court females with zig-zag swimming! The males swim in a z-shaped pattern in front of the female, probably to show off their mating colors. Before male fish can get the attention of female fish, they must gain a territory and build a nest. In sticklebacks, females inspect nests that the males build and then decide if they want to deposit their eggs. Males care for the offspring before and after the eggs hatch. A female fish would benefit from identifying “high quality” males and choosing those males for mates. High quality males would have more energy to protect their offspring and would make better fathers. They could also pass on genes that make offspring more attractive to females in the next generation.

Scientist Alycia collecting fish from a freshwater lake in British Columbia, Canada.

Alycia is a scientist who is interested in the stickleback’s mating behaviors. She wanted to figure out why there are differences between males and why certain males can attract a mate while others cannot. What is it about the way a male looks, moves, or smells that attracts females? What male traits are females looking at when deciding on a mate? Alycia thought female sticklebacks may choose males with redder throats and/or more complex behaviors because those traits show the female that those males are high quality. Previous work with these fish showed that male behavior, color, or territory size, or the presence of a nest could all be important. But it was still not clear which characteristic might be most important.

Alycia set up an experiment to figure out if male throat color or zig-zag swimming behaviors were attractive to females. She used a total of 24 male fish and six 75-gallon tanks. She divided the males up evenly between the large tanks, placing four males in each one. For 10 days she observed the male fish and recorded competition behaviors, territory defense, and nest building. On the tenth day, she introduced one female to each tank of four males. She recorded how the males behaved in courtship and which males the females chose. She also recorded the redness of each male.

Featured scientist: Alycia R. Lackey from Michigan State University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 7.9

More news on Alycia’s work on stickleback fish can be found at her BEACON blog post, “Making and Breaking a Species” and her blog post for the MSU museum.