Digital Commons Network^™

Relationship Between Learning And Bt In Ornate Box Turtles (Terrapene Ornata), Brianna M. Wilson

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Cognition is important to the individual animal and can help determine its role and impact on its ecological niche. Variation in cognition may influence the way animals interact with their environment and their performance in certain behaviors such as resource acquisition, range philopatry, and navigation. The question has been raised as to whether cognitive styles such as fast-slow or speed-accuracy types share a relationship with behavioral type. Animal personality (behavioral type) is made up of five axes: boldness, aggression, sociality, activity, and exploration. In this study, we investigate learning in a western Nebraska population of ornate box turtles (Terrapene …

Effect Of Functional Trait Variation On Bee Body Temperature, Gabriella A. Muller

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Bees are both ecologically and economically important pollinators for maintaining agricultural production and the health of many diverse ecosystems. As our world continues to change, bee diversity and population numbers are declining due to increasing temperatures. Functional traits such as body size and coloration can mediate the effects of such harsh thermal conditions on insect performance. Specifically, bee body size can significantly impact thermal parameters, with larger bees gaining and losing heat more slowly than smaller bees due to higher surface area to volume ratios. To obtain a better understanding of these relationships, we studied the variation in body temperature …

Variation In Synthetic Floral Microbiome Composition Is Largely Ignored By Foraging Bumblebees, Nevin P. Cullen

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Most flowers are occupied by diverse communities of microbes, which can alter floral attractiveness to key pollinators and floral fitness by interacting with floral traits. Different species of flower often acquire unique communities of microbes. Consequently, pollinators are frequently forced to choose between two flowers with distinct floral microbiomes while foraging. However, it is currently unknown whether pollinators have an inherent preference for flowers containing one floral microbiome over another, and whether microbial preference is modified by variation in floral traits. We investigated this knowledge gap using distinct bacteria and yeasts cultured from a nickel-hyperaccumulating plant and its non-accumulating relative. …

Convergent Evolution Of Antifreeze Proteins In Two Insect Families Supported By Whole Genome And Gene Family Loci Analyses, Shaw Kagawa

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Various Coleoptera (beetles) and Lepidoptera (moths) insects are known to produce highly active antifreeze peptides (AFPs), an adaptive trait that enabled them to avoid freezing and survive severe winters. These include the grain pest Tenebrio molitor (yellow mealworm), pine-boring Rhagium beetles, the fire-colored Dendroides beetles, a stag beetle, and the Choristoneura spruce budworms (moths). Insect AFPs are small peptides of ~8 to 15 kDa, consisting of several tandem 13-amino acid repeats of similar sequences, each ending with a conserved tripeptide Thr-Cys/aa-Thr motif, found to be important for ice binding. Except for the eastern spruce budworm, the evolutionary origin/s and process/es …

Quantifying The Relationship Between Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi And A Native And Invasive Thistle, Nicole Baker, Lucia Vera, Ian Rosales

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) associate with 80% of vascular plant roots and are an important part of nutrient exchange. Our research quantified the relationship between (AMF) and native Pasture Thistle (Cirsium discolor) and invasive Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense). We hypothesized that Pasture Thistle would have a stronger relationship with AMF than Canada Thistle because of the degraded mutualism hypothesis, which states that invasive species have reduced relationships with AMF. For our experiment, we grew inoculated and non-inoculated plants at 10 different levels of soil phosphorus concentrations. Pasture Thistle and Canada Thistle were both facultatively dependent upon …

An Optimal Patch Use Model For Nitrogen Foraging In Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi, Xin Lin

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Optimal Foraging Theory has been widely used to study animal foraging behaviors, but has seldom been applied to symbiotic microbes like arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. To date we know little about how AM fungi make decisions to forage in different nutrient patches. To help address this gap we here apply Optimal Foraging Theory to understand how AM fungi forage for nitrogen. We focus on nitrogen because AM fungi need more nitrogen than their plant hosts and soil nitrogen availability can shift the relationship between AM fungi and their hosts from mutualism to parasitism. We present a stochastic dynamic programming model …

Forest Recruitment Dynamics Within The Southern Boreal-Temperate Ecotone, Kiley M. Chernicky

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Understanding how global climate change will alter future forest composition is especially challenging in forest communities where tree species have long co-occurred, but their competitive balance may be altered due to changes in climate. Of particular concern with increasing global temperatures are boreal forest communities that lie on the southern boreal-temperate forest ecotone, where the boreal forest is particularly vulnerable. The aim of my research is to investigate shifts in recruitment dynamics due to climate change near the southern range limit of two historically co-occurring boreal forest conifer species, white spruce (Picea glauca) and balsam fir (Abies …

Spatiotemporal Patterns Of Ticks And Tick-Borne Disease Dynamics At Neon Sites Across A Sub-Continental Scale., Ana Sofia Rivera

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

At local scales, dynamics of ticks and tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease are driven by resource pulses, such as mast seeding in forest trees, that creates increases in tick hosts. Tick-borne diseases in humans have nearly doubled between 1940 and 2004 and understanding the dynamics of infectious diseases has long been of interest for ecologists. The family Ixodidae is the most capable of transmitting pathogens to humans and tick-borne diseases are the most common vector of illness in the United States. The objective of this research is to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of ticks and tick-borne diseases, which may …

Effects Of Paternal Heat Exposure And Parental Care On The Development Of Offspring In Gasterosteus Aculeatus, Emma Borgert

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Humans are profoundly altering the abundance and distribution of organisms via climate change. In particular, warming temperatures are affecting marine and freshwater ecosystems by increasing physiological stress, limiting growth, and decreasing dissolved oxygen. With all this change occurring, an understanding of how organisms are going to cope is crucial. Transgenerational plasticity – when parental experiences alter offspring traits - can allow organisms to rapidly adapt to environmental change. Previous literature has focused on the role of maternal experiences on offspring traits, but paternal experiences are just as important. Fathers can influence their offspring in multiple ways, including changes via both …

Effect Of Variable Canopy Cover On Floral Visitation, Toby Shaya

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Pollinators provide essential services for ecosystem function. Studies aimed at understanding how availability of floral resources impacts pollinators find that canopy cover impacts bees indirectly by affecting the amount of floral resources in the forest understory and directly by changing the thermal environment in which they can thermoregulate. As ectotherms the maintenance of bee body temperature depends on the distribution of patches of sun and shade throughout a landscape, which can be dependent on canopy cover. The goals of this study were to understand how variable canopy cover drives floral visitation patterns in oak savanna found in the Oak Openings …

The Influence Of Urban Landscape Characteristics And Regional Climate On Bee Diversity, Bridget T. Harter

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

When compared to the lack of resources within homogeneous agricultural lands, cities can serve as a refuge for insect pollinators by providing a variety of floral and nesting resources. Areas of intense urbanization, with a high percentage of impervious surface, reduce the size and quality of pollinator habitat and negatively impact pollinators. The spatial complexity within and between urban landscapes may explain this contradictory view of cities as detrimental and beneficial for insect pollinators. This study examines the influence of (1) the spatial configuration of nearby, herbaceous vegetation and (2) regional climate on bee diversity across cities. Bee abundance and …

Urban Or Rural? Does It Matter To Bumble Bees An Analysis In Kalamazoo, Mi, Elizabeth M. Silber

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Bumble bee species are declining in vast geographical areas due to many factors, including reductions in suitable nest site locations and floral resources, as land uses shift toward urbanization and agricultural intensification. The potential for urban areas to support bumble bees is understudied. The purpose of this study was to see how environment type impacts bumble bee species richness, abundance, and diversity in both urban and rural environments. Data from private and public spaces was gathered through the usage of citizen science. Observations were solicited under a previously established iNaturalist citizen science project, Southwest Michigan Bee Watch, and past data …

Effect Of Temperature Variation On Endurance Swimming Capacity Of Juvenile White Sturgeon (Acipenser Transmontanus), Alex M. Stolberg

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

White sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus), a species within one of the most globally threatened taxa, are highly susceptible to changes in their environments due to unique life history traits. Specifically, juvenile white sturgeon are impacted by altered watershed dynamics caused by water diversion structures such as dams, weirs, irrigation ditches, or levees. One location of great concern is the Sacramento-San Joaquin (S-SJ) watershed where decades of water diversion has brought on changes to the temperature, flow, and management of the area. This study looks to primarily identify the impact of water temperature on the endurance swimming capacity of juvenile white sturgeon, …

Scaling Global Urban Greenspace, Kyra J. Liedtke

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Cites are novel ecosystems. Understanding the complex interactions between urban abiotic and biotic attributes is important for managing future urban expansion. Using urban scaling theory (UST) combined with global datasets raises the prospect of deriving predictive rules for scaling urban greenspace with city size. Aspects of the city, such as greenspace, are influenced by several social and ecological factors that scale with a city's size. Empirical data from European cities showed superlinear scaling, in which greenspace increased disproportionately with city size. However, the comprehension of global greenspace scaling still needs to be understood. A macroecological perspective using a scaling approach …

Host Size Reduction In Response To Parasitic Infection Fuels Trophic Cascades, Lauren Albert

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Outbreaks of disease epidemics continue to erupt in host populations. Within these populations, parasites drive top-down effects. For example, when parasites kill their hosts, they can indirectly increase the hosts’ resource density, causing trophic cascades. This phenomena arises in a diversity of parasite-host-resource systems; however, the mechanisms of parasite-driven trophic cascades remain less clear. A straightforward density-mediated mechanism occurs when parasites increase host mortality, depressing host density. Alternatively, host traits such as body size could be affected, depressing host resource regulation. To disentangle connections between parasites and trophic cascades, we must measure mechanisms operating at both the population (density) and …

Analyzing Decomposition In A Temperate Lotic System, Trevor J. Rallo

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Decomposition of allochthonous material (e.g., leaves or woody debris) is an important process in stream ecosystems. Breakdown of this allochthonous matter is dependent on multiple factors, such as species identity or the habitat type (e.g. riffle vs pool). Decomposition rate has received limited attention as a potential metric of stream health, which could be useful for conservation and citizen science groups. In this study, we quantified microbe density and macroinvertebrate diversity, and related these variables back to the decomposer taxa, habitat type and stream health value (quantified as Q-value). Leaf litter bags that varied in mesh size (2.0 and 0.5 …

Pre-Dredging Assessment Of Aquatic Macroinvertebrates From Sharon Lake And Creek, Cincinnati, Ohio, Paige M. Loboschefski, Addyson M. Thomas, Emma J. Weiss

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Dams can serve a multitude of purposes for humans including water storage and flood control. However, dams can also have negative cascading impacts on the surrounding ecosystem. One impact is sedimentation, where reduced water flow can increase the accumulation of benthic sediment. Nutrients can also accumulate leading to eutrophication, affecting organismal and ecosystem health. In order to improve water and ecosystem quality, dredging can occur to remove benthic sediments. The main objective of this study was to characterize the macroinvertebrate community above and below a dam prior to substrate dredging. This study was conducted in Sharon Lake and Creek near …

Vocal Copying Responses Of Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus) To Auditory Playbacks Of Signature And Non-Signature T. Truncatus Whistles, Larissa K. Michel

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) communicate primarily through vocalizations, of which two primary types are signature whistles (function to convey identity information) and non-signature whistles (function presently unknown). They are also adept at copying other dolphins’ whistles. Currently, knowledge about copies is limited. My project aims to further the understanding of the context of whistle copy production in bottlenose dolphins.

My research investigates whether bottlenose dolphins produce vocal copies in response to playbacks of signature whistles (SW) or non-signature whistles (NSW), using subsets of playback experiments generated between 1989 and 2014 at Sarasota Bay (Florida) health assessments. Using Raven …

Defining Best Management Practices For Bee Conservation In Agroforestry Systems, Elijah C. Cardona

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Wild bees are an indispensable part of neotropical ecosystems because of their role in agriculture and native flora pollination. Despite their importance, wild bees are threatened throughout their distribution by pesticides, habitat loss, land use change and climate change. The objective of this study was to understand how to better manage agroforestry systems for wild bees by asking if wild bee abundance is influenced by the level of shade cover, agroforest type, the number or diversity of floral resources, tree diversity, and the density of trees in an agroforest. A total of 10 agroforests were selected in San Luis de …

Elevated Co2 Drives Community And Network Structural Change Within Foliar Microbiomes Of Soybean, Connor Morozumi

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Microbiomes within plants can play large roles in determining responses to stress or perturbation, increasingly common in a rapidly changing world. For example, foliar endophytes are known to increase stress tolerance to drought and decrease herbivory among many other effects. How these microbes are likely to respond to global change themselves is poorly understood. Global changes, such as increased atmospheric CO₂, which can influence host plant physiological processes, have the potential to directly and indirectly alter microbiome community structure. Here, we assessed community and network structure of bacterial and fungal phyllosphere microbiomes within soybean (Glycine max). …

The Effects Of False Springs And Late Freezing Events On Germination Success Of Prairie Plants, Sawyer J. Wittman

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Prairie ecosystems are some of the most fragmented habitats across the Midwestern USA and are susceptible to the effects of climate change. False springs occur when temperatures rise unseasonably early, followed by low temperatures returning. A late freeze is when temperatures drop drastically in early spring, potentially damaging the plants that begin to grow. This research experimentally tests how winter climate change affects the germination rates of 24 different prairie plant species (12 in Poaceae, 4 Asteraceae, 4 in Fabaceae, and 4 in Lamiaceae), where half bloom in the spring and half bloom in the summer. Seeds are cold stratified …

Genomic Basis Of Antifreeze Trait Divergence In Antarctic And Patagonian Toothfish, Shriram Bhat

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

The Dissostichus genus of notothenioid fish contains two giant, iconic sister species, Dissostichus mawsoni (Antarctic toothfish) and Dissostichus eleginoides (Patagonian toothfish), which inhabit thermally distinct environments. D. mawsoni is protected by antifreeze glycoproteins (AFGPs) from freezing in the cold waters of the Southern Ocean, while D. eleginoides lacks detectable antifreeze activity despite its recent divergence. Interestingly, recent evidence suggests the possibility of a third species in the Dissostichus genus, which is currently believed to be a separate population of D. eleginoides closer to the Southern Ocean whose genome has recently been published. Our study focuses on D. eleginoides specimens from …

Novel Model For Tau Protein Expression And Function: The Honeybee Brain, Abdallah F. Sher

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Scientists have long attempted to understand the mechanisms by which senescence occurs. Leading theories suggest that aging is an emergent property of natural selection’s prioritization of reproductive ability. Social insects, such as the honeybee (Apis mellifera) challenge this idea, separating colonies into reproductive and non-reproductive castes. Worker honeybees do not reproduce, suggesting that selection prioritizes tasks other than reproduction. Forager honeybees, for example, display improved cognitive and immune function compared to other behavioral phenotypes of bees, likely to support their ability to perform tasks such as navigating complex environments or making context-dependent decisions while foraging. Foragers are normally older honeybees, …

Geographic Analysis Of Sex Chromosome Polymorphism In The Virginian Wild Strawberry, Trezalka A. Budinsky

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

The evolution of sex chromosomes is a ubiquitous and essential diversifying mechanism in eukaryotes. Yet early stages of sex-chromosome differentiation are poorly understood. The subdioecious octoploid, Fragaria virginiana, provides a rare opportunity to study the beginnings of sex chromosome evolution due to its young, polymorphic ZW sex system. Females are ZW and males/hermaphrodites are ZZ. F. virginiana has a small sex-determining region (SDR) located on the female W chromosome that has undergone three transposition events between the strawberry's four subgenomes, resulting in three SDR haplotypes: alpha (the result of a first transposition and closest to a pre-sex chromosome ancestral …

Phosphours Trasnport In Soil: Locating And Identifying A Limiting Element, Jeremy Giannone

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

The phosphorus (P) cycle is not well understood. While carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) have gas phases, P does not. Phosphorus runoff in waterways and its shortage are both understood since their causes are due to agricultural demands. Fertilizers increase the rate of phosphorus in the soil leading to greater runoff which then accumulates in the surrounding bodies of water.¹ From an economic perspective the phosphorus availability and food prices have a direct correlation. The instability of phosphate prices may have direct causation to the instability of the food and agriculture markets.²In order to deal with these …

Preliminary Report On Fossil Marine Vertebrates From The Upper Cretaceous Hartland Shale From Republic County, Kansas, Brianna E. Ortiz

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

The Hartland Shale of the Upper Cretaceous Greenhorn Limestone is a rock unit broadly distributed in north-central Kansas, that formed in the Western Interior Seaway, a Late Cretaceous epicontinental seaway in North America approximately 93 million years ago. The vertebrate fossil record of the Hartland Shale of Kansas is poorly known, where previous records were confined to a tooth of the extinct lamniform shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli and skeletal remains of a plesiosaur besides taxonomically uninformative bones and teeth of bony fishes. Here, we describe additional teeth of C. mantelli as well as the discovery of multiple teeth belonging to a …

Fossil Marine Vertebrates From The Mid-Graneros Shale (Upper Cretaceous: Mid-Cenomanian), Russell County, Kansas, Usa, Austin M. Salvino

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

The upper Graneros Shale are deposits of the late Cretaceous (ca. 100 Ma.) Western Interior Seaway in North America. Various vertebrate fossils have been located within the deposit, but detailed documentation had yet to be conclusively reported. This study takes into consideration the remains of fossil fishes from this uppermost Graneros shale location. The specific Graneros shale was in Russel County Kansas (Fig 1B). A location once containing a shallow marine environment of the Cretaceous Western Interior Sea. The specimens and fossilized vertebrate evidence found provide sufficient support of previous paleoecology inferences made in other locations containing Graneros shale deposits. …

Rapid Assesment Of Aquatic Insect Diversity And Abundance Used To Evaluate The Quality Of Stream Restoration, Kaleb Stephen Kindoll

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Stream and wetland restoration activities seek to improve the function of aquatic ecosystems. Measurement of the diversity and abundance of aquatic insects are commonly used to evaluate the success of restoration efforts, but these measurements are often very time consuming. In this study, we attempt to construct an efficient method that can be used to rapidly assess the diversity and abundance of aquatic insects as a measure of the quality of stream restoration. We suspended uniform sized pieces of cardboard paper coated with adhesive to trap insects in three different environments: one restored and two unrestored streams with similar characteristics. …

Foraging Ants Dislodged Via Simulated Instantaneous Leaf Movement, Olivia M. Gamsky, Andrew R. Seiler, Alyssa Y. Stark, Stephen P. Yanoviak

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

Cursorial arboreal organisms like ants face numerous challenges to their adhesive systems. Wind, rain, and the activities of vertebrates frequently dislodge foraging ants from tree surfaces. Falling is a significant hazard resulting in substantial displacement, thus ants are predicted to fully engage their tarsal adhesive systems when the likelihood of disturbance is high. Here we used a small catapult to experimentally test the effect of instantaneous red oak (Quercus rubra) leaf movement on the adhesive capabilities of Camponotus pennsylvanicus worker ants. Catapult velocity and displacement mimicked the effects of Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) branch landings. …

Preliminary Report On Fossil Marine Vertebrates From The Mid-Pfeifer Shale (Upper Cretaceous) From Central Kansas, Alison G. Mieczkowski

2023 Midwest Ecology & Evolution Conference

The Pfeifer Shale is a 93-million-years-old rock unit belonging to the Upper Cretaceous Greenhorn Limestone broadly distributed in central Kansas, where it formed in the Western Interior Seaway, a Late Cretaceous epicontinental seaway in North America. Here, we describe fossil marine vertebrates collected from the middle portion of the Pfeifer Shale at a locality in Russell County, Kansas. Surface-collected specimens are largely represented by teeth of some extinct sharks, such as Ptychodus, Cretoxyrhina, and Squalicorax, that are typical for rock units of the Western Interior Seaway immediately above and below the Pfeifer Shale. Examination of microscopic fossils …