Putting all your eggs in one laptop

Kokomo biologist to use grant money to purchase Qubit

IU Kokomo’s Faculty Development and Grants Committee made the award for the purchase of a Qubit respirometry/data acquisition system. The computer-operated logging unit collects physiological data from animals in the field.

Most of the research will be conducted on the Kokomo campus, but Finkler hopes to conduct some later fieldwork at Indiana’s Mississinewa and Salamonie reservoirs, as well as in southeast Michigan.

Finkler previously has received grants for the study of turtles, salamanders and crayfish.

“I have been interested in exercise metabolism and locomotion in lower vertebrates since graduate school,” he said. “However, many of the ideas I wanted to explore had to be shelved when I started working at IU Kokomo, as we did not have the equipment that would allow me to make these types of investigations. This grant will allow me to pull some project ideas out of mothballs.”

Finkler said the new research will help answer the question: Are phenomena observed in the lab applicable to the organism in its natural environment?

“This equipment will greatly expand the types of studies I can conduct outside of the laboratory,” he said. “For example, I can insert air tubes and sensor probes into a subterranean nest of turtle eggs or in a crayfish burrow, turn on the system, and it will automatically record gas composition, temperature and so on, in the burrow intermittently for as long as three months. I can come back to the nest and download the data on a laptop.”

One study will examine the energy cost of locomotion in spring-breeding salamanders. “Before breeding, female salamanders form large masses of eggs in their abdomens,” he said. “This mass could create quite an encumbrance to movement,” he said. To mate and lay their eggs, the female salamanders migrate from their winter burrows to bodies of water, a distance which might be more than 650 feet—“quite a hike for an animal four to five inches long,” he said.

Finkler will use the Qubit to monitor how this exercise elevates the female’s metabolism. Comparing this with the energy expenditure of male salamanders, he will consider how the measurements might relate to differences in the behavior and body shapes of both sexes. In a similar project, he will examine how egg carrying influences metabolism and swimming performance in two crayfish species.

A final project will examine the effect of temperature on respiration in large insects. As temperatures rise, many large insects respond by ventilating their respiratory systems. This rise in metabolism is indicated by increased oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production, Finkler explained. His experiment will look for correlations between increased metabolism and abdominal muscle activity in the Madagascan hissing roach.

Finkler is committed to creating research experiences in biology for undergraduates and wants to recruit IU Kokomo students to help with some of his research through IU’s Undergraduate Research Summer Institute or independent research for credit hours.

“Undergraduate research gives students the opportunity to not only work through procedures and collect data, but also to learn to analyze and think critically about the data, integrate their findings with previous studies and communicate their findings to colleagues. It shows them that science is not a bunch of material memorized out of a textbook, but an exciting, dynamic exploration of new ideas. I can think of nothing that prepares students better for careers in the sciences.”

For more on the earlier work of biologist Michael Finkler, see this IU Home Pages archival Web site.