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One of the things that I have been very interested
in is the effect of pesticides on reptiles.
Part of the reason that I chose reptiles is
they're quite understudied.
There's a lot of them and they are often
in aquatic environments.
And they're the coolest thing ever, absolutely.
That's right, they're pretty cool.
So the animal that I am working with is the northern water snake
and people will be able to see those pretty much anywhere.
We gather them from Lake Charleston and Lake Mattoon.
They feed mostly on fish and amphibians, so they are
really exposed to a lot of pesticide run-off, which is
pretty common in this area.
So what I was most interested in is how the pesticides
affect the babies that the water snakes have.
I know this is not related to your research specifically,
Lori, but how did we come by this animal,
why is this animal so special?
Well, these water snakes are not very liked by a lot of people
and so that's another reason that I'm very interested in
working with them because I think that it's really
important to educate people about how important they are
to the ecosystem and to humans.
Another aspect of what I've been doing is a lot of
education with students.
I've given lots of presentations to elementary students and to
high school students.
So that's a really important apsect of this lab and also
with my own personal research.
I think that's very commendable because snakes in particular,
these organisms are so often maligned and persecuted by the
public without really an understanding, without a
firm understanding for their biology and really, some of the
remarkable things that they are capable of doing in the wild,
in the natural setting.
A little bit of background on this study is we caught about
25 females, and they were all pregnant, and throughout the
entire summer we had a whole team of students
that helped me, Team Nerodia.
We had a whole team of students that helped me,
and every week we weighed the moms and we fed them fish that
had been injected with a pesticide called atrazine,
and what we found are some pretty interesting things.
We're still analyzing the results, but we wanted to
measure the estradiol levels, which are a really important
female hormone, they form things like estrogen.
And so we took blood samples, and we saw how
it affects the babies.
So all of those blood samples are being analyzed right now
using some special equipment and some special assays.
We're going to find where the estradiol levels, where these
estrogen levels were for the different animals and how they
flucuate throughout the pregnancy and how they
change according to their exposure to this chemical.
Since people have been making things like pesticides, there
have been over 20,000 new chemicals and only about
20 of them have been studied extensively.
So we really don't know how they affect the environment
and how they affect us.
So, using these guys to help us understand that is something
that I believe is really important.
I've had the opportunity to do that in Steve's lab and here
at Eastern, and that's been something that I have been
really grateful for, and it's been a really great experience.