Spring semester at Kenyon doesn’t feel like spring until independent projects are over (really- it snowed on April 1st). Here’s a little of what it looks like:  

Wright Lab members Hannah Wedig, Sarah McPeek, and Jess Kotnour got a behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History as part of the lab’s effort to understand how flight affects the evolution of birds.

Sarah McPeek, Hannah Wedig, and Jess Kotnour got a behind the scenes tour of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s vertebrate paleontology collection. Here they are with two of the national collection’s triceratops skulls.

Hannah Wedig, Sarah McPeek, and Jess Kotnour show off their favorite bones of an Emperor Penguin in the ornithology collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The Wright Lab spent spring break measuring bird bones at the Smithsonian to understand how flight affects the evolution of life history and ecology across birds.

Jess Kotnour, Sarah McPeek, and Hannah Wedig are shown the endocast of an ungulate skull by Dr. Meghan Balk, postdoctoral fellow in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, vertebrate paleontology.

Sarah McPeek, Jess Kotnour, and Hannah Wedig admire a skull of Pakicetus, and early, semi-aquatic whale, in the vertebrate paleontology collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

Sarah McPeek and Hannah Wedig take scaled photographs of bird skeletal specimens in the ornithology collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History as part of the lab’s effort to understand how flight affects the evolution of birds.

Professor Schulz and Ben Berejka took blood samples of song birds at the BFEC to investigate the innate avian immune response.

Professor Schultz and I (Ben Berejka) are taking blood samples, measurements and banding song birds at the BFEC. Later this semester we will be testing the bacteria killing ability between the blood of migratory and resident bird species. This is a strong indicator of a bird’s innate immune response (Species pictures is a Dark Eyed Junco).

A sharp-shinned hawk caught down at the BFEC while studying song birds.

Students in the introductory biology lab course worked with a range of organisms such as mosquitos, Lumbriculus, E. coli, and sorghum seedlings for their independent projects.

Sophomore Kristen Edgeworth and her young sorghum seedlings

Kate Alexy and Meredith Glover plan their mosquito research strategy

Lauren Limbach and Samantha Hayes pellet their E. coli cells

Srila Chadalavada, Meg Dye, and Paige Matijasich at work with their Lumbriculus

Some of Team Cyanide prepping their assays

Elena Prenovitz and Richard Fu preparing their reagents

Miriam Hyman ’21 uses FACS to compete two strains of E. coli

Sam Schaffner ’21 uses FACS to compete two strains of E. coli

Professor Gunning documented the banks of Wolf Run in early spring.

Early Spring at the BFEC: the banks of Wolf Run.

Early Spring at the BFEC: a Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) emerges from the banks of Wolf Run.

Roadkill was the topic of my most recent digital photography project. As a biology student, I wanted to find a way to draw attention to the issues of roads that we often take for granted. We lose literally countless (because the U.S. doesn’t count hard enough) numbers of individual animals to roadkill every year and the environmental effects are vastly understudied. Roads divide habitats and restrict population movements in extreme ways and hopefully in the future (with the help of science!) we can create innovative solutions to these issues.

– Ben Berejka

Roadkill was the topic of my most recent digital photography project and as a biology student I wanted to find a way to draw attention to the issues of roads that we often take for granted. We loose literally countless (because the U.S. doesn’t count hard enough) numbers of individual animals to roadkill every year and the environmental effects are heavily understudied. Roads divide habitats and restrict population movements in extreme ways and hopefully in the future (with the help of science!) we can create innovative solutions to these issues.