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As an undergraduate researcher and George H. Cook scholar in Dr. Chloe Hawkings's lab...
I'm developing a senior thesis resarch project on the ant colonies of downtown Manhattan. Under the guidance of Dr. Hawkings and her graduate student, Jumana Hayat, I will conduct a transcriptome analysis of 3 colonies from Tompkins Square Park, Washington Square Park, and the High Line throughout spring, summer, and fall. Analyzing differentially expressed genes will allow me to further hypothesize about the effect of seasonal variations in temperature on immunity, metabolism, or behavior in ManhattANTS!
Why Manhattan?
Cities like New York are subject to a phenomenon known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect, which arises from urban landscaping and concentrated human activity (Yang et al. 2016). Increased surface temperature and global warming may have analogous effects on biological activity. This makes NYC a pretty good place to study how increasing temperatures alters an organism's biochemical mechanisms and their respective genetic code.
How could something as small as an ant tell us anything about something as big as global warming?
Well, an organism's size has no correlation with its responsibility to an ecosystem. In fact, ants are one of the most ubiquitous terrestrial organisms, populating every continent in the world (Parr & Bishop 2022). Except Antarctica... its too cold there for most of us. Ants are often used a model organism for mapping the effect of temperature on various fitness traits, they've adapted lots of different ecosystems and respond quickly to environmental changes (Khimoun et al. 2020). For the purposes of this experiment, they're easy to find in abundance (for lots of replicates...) and thanks to E.O. Wilson, and others, we know lots about them.
Also, I just have a special place in my heart for our six-legged sisters.
References
Yang, L., Qian, F., Song, D.-X., & Zheng, K.-J. (2016). Research on urban heat-island effect. Procedia Engineering, 169, 11–18. doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2016.10.002
Parr, C. L., & Bishop, T. R. (2022). The response of ants to climate change. Global Change Biology, 28(10), 3188–3205. doi:10.1111/gcb.16140
Khimoun, A., Doums, C., Molet, M., Kaufmann, B., Peronnet, R., Eyer, P. A., & Mona, S. (2020). Urbanization without isolation: The absence of genetic structure among cities and forests in the tiny acorn ant temnothorax nylanderi. Biology Letters, 16(1), 20190741. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2019.0741
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