FINDING WORKABLE UNDERGRAD RESEARCH PROJECTS: MORE DIFFICULT THAN IT SOUNDS!
As professors, one of the biggest challenges we face is finding projects for undergraduate students that will convey the thrill of scientific inquiry with the practical side of semester class structure. In many cases there just is not time to conceive of, implement, and complete a project in the 10 or 15 weeks the class will run. Field courses, like the one I co-teach in Belize are even more restricted time-wise. We get a total of 14 days in Belize and much of that is spent visiting sites and listening to lectures. We spend the majority of the time at the rainforest site, BFREE, but with all the activities we do, we only end up with four days to take data on our research projects. What to do? We work on short projects that garner a lot of data quickly, that are doable close to the bunkhouse and dining hall, and are scientifically alluring. It has taken some finessing and trial-and-error to find projects that will work. Fortunately, technology helped out! We discovered that with our bat detectors, we could get estimates of bat activity levels between two habitats at the same time. We also have set up camera traps to develop an idea of what terrestrial mammals are present in the area.While the camera traps are fun, they don’t yield rigorous data; we can only tell what species we “capture,” and that will not be an exhaustive survey. Nor can we tell anything about population size only using four cameras. We have also attempted to set up “traps” with peanuts circled by non-toxic florescent powder. This setup would hopefully allow us to estimate the rate of seed predation, and coupled with camera traps, determine what species are eating seeds. However, most of our set-ups never lost any peanuts and the one where the peanuts disappeared every night did not get any pictures. We aren’t sure if whoever was taking the peanuts was too small to set off the trigger on the camera trap (like a little spiny rat) or the equipment failed for another reason. Well, there’s downside of technology! However, we did get one extraordinary photo of a jaguar walking past one of our camera traps.
This photo tells us a few things: it’s a male, and it is not the same jaguar that we “captured” last year (compare the spots on the photos), it was within ¼ mile of the bunkhouse, so students should be cautious during bathroom trips, and it looks healthy. With more cameras, we could potentially get an idea of how many others are out there, but that is for another time.
On the other hand our bat project worked really well. After the first night of collecting data at dusk by standing with bat detectors in one hand and swatting at the continual blitzkrieg of mosquitoes with the other, one of the students had a brainstorm that we could set up a couple of open-screened tents and sit inside. This plan actually worked well and our suffering was greatly diminished! And without a loss of data, that is, the screening did not seem to interfere with what we could pick up with our ultrasonic bat detectors. 
We had one tent set up in the middle of a clear-cut area (actually the helipad mowed and maintained for emergencies) and one tent set up along the edge of the forest. The hypothesis we tested was whether there is a difference in bat activity between the two habitats. One would expect that bats would forage in areas where they can maximize their energy intake while at the same time staying safe. We thought that bats would forage more along the forest edge because that would give them some cover from night flying predators (owls maybe), and this is the pattern we find in our home state of Delaware. But in Belize, at least in our little microcosm of the rainforest at BFREE, we found more bats foraging in the wide-open area. We were able to see this result in just the four nights of data collection and not only did we get usable data from this mini-project, and set the stage for future student research projects, but it was an excellent introduction for students in how to conceive and implement a scientific inquiry.
One of the projects we tried last year that DIDN’T work well was, unfortunately, our dung beetle projects. We had hoped to examine species diversity in different habitats and also to look at dung burial patterns. Well, one of the reasons it did not work was lack of good bait. We used horse dung and any good dung beetle biologist working in the Neotropics will tell you that horse dung is not particularly attractive to dung beetles. Hmmm, so what is attractive? Again, as any good dung beetle biologist will tell you, primate dung is very attractive; actually the human variety has been shown to be the MOST attractive (brings in the most species to traps). Folks just plain got squeamish about contributing to this scientific effort. Somehow, research on bats is more appealing to undergraduate college students! So, we go with where the interest is highest and we can actually get data fast.
May 16th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
I thought the fact that dung beetles like human dung and primate dung more than others quite funny. It is probably because humans and primates have a more variegated diet and therefore it has a more interesting and appealing composition.
Tell me what is it that dung beetles produce with it?
Rita Leal
June 4th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Rita has really hit the target with dung beetle cuisine preferences! The dung of omnivores appears to have the greatest appeal to these insects. Human dung, other primate dung, and most favorite: pig dung, are all much more attractive to most rainforest dung beetles than cow, horse, deer, or any carnivore dung. In fact, it is well known among dung beetle biologists that swine dung from the swine research unit of the agriculture college at a certain large southern university is THE most attractive bait to use for capturing the greatest number of dung beetles! But be careful! This dung is also incredibly explosive and has been known to be the cause of some rather messy car incidents!
Dung beetles eat the dung themselves, actually the bacteria in the dung. It is their main source of food (although some dung beetle species have a more varied menu, including dead animals or rotting fruit in their diet. there are even a few that specialize on weirder things like live millipedes!). Yummy!
Beetles also use the dung to provision their nests, that is, they make brood balls out of the dung, lay eggs in the brood balls, and the larval beetle develops to the pupal and then adult stages completely encased in its own private food source. Most of the time, these nests are underground, which leads to some of the beneficial effects dung beetles provide us with, such as recycling of nutrients, planting occasional seeds, and clearing up the soil surface.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I just stumbled on to your site and was interested to see what you and your students are doing at BFREE. Since 2004 I have been bringing a class from Sterling College to BFREE to conduct a watershed study of the Monkey River. We spend the majority of time collecting data (biological, physical, chemical water analysis along with soil analysis and natural community surveying) on the Bladen around BFREE. My colleague and myself are also challenged by the lack of time in the field - we split our 16 days in Belize between BFREE, Wee Wee Caye, and Monkey River village.
In January of 2007 we also put up a few cameras with hopes of getting images of the jungle fauna. Unfortunately we didn’t get any, in part because the cameras were only up for a couple of nights. When we return in January of 2009 we will put the cameras back up and will share what we find with you.
Farley Brown
March 16th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Hello Farley Anne:
It was great to get a comment from a fellow BFREEphile! It is such an extraordinary place, particularly for field courses. Here is our website: http://www.desu.edu/special/belize/index.php
Having time to do student research projects within a couple of days is challenging, and I have tried several (some detailed in the blog). Finally, we hit on bat activity, which can be monitored with inexpensive bat detectors (at least two so a comparison can be made concurrently between habitats). We don’t really do a nice comparative research project with camera traps, as there just isn’t enough time (or enough cameras!), so we use it as more of a descriptive tool. We have been leaving traps in four locations for four nights, but the best place is the main access road, about 1/2-1 km up from the river, on the side across from the bunkhouses. This is where you see all the animal tracks on the 6-mile hike in! Especially jaguars. We also use 1 G memory cards, because so many other things set off the traps (leaves, wind, people). We have also gotten jaguar photos near First Creek. For some reason, we haven’t gotten any pictures of animals at the lagoon, which I thought would be a hot spot!
We had a colleague along this trip (Jan 2008) that took some water quality samples up and down the Bladen River. I’d be curious to see the comparison with your readings. This project also worked out well as something that a group of students could accomplish in a few days.
Please keep me posted on the success of your camera traps, and good luck!
Kevina