Page 20 - Abacoa Community News - January '21

Page 20, Abacoa

FAU FeAtUres

Very Hungry And Angry, Elizabeth B. Brown, Ph.D., all within FAU’s Department of “Thanks to this remarkable donation, the Honors College
Caterpillars Head-Butt To Get Biological Sciences and the program in neurogenetics. has the opportunity to launch a research forum that will greatly
benefit its students and faculty,” Morton said. “We are all excited
The research was supported by the National Science

What They Want Foundation. about this new initiative.”
A key objective of the Morton Research Forum is to

Inspired by his Harriet L. Wilkes Honors wed FAU’s research enterprise with the needs and goals of
own butterfly garden College Launches The Morton constituencies in South Florida. The program will feature
at home, a Florida partnerships with select companies and organizations and provide
Atlantic University Research Forum new channels for disseminating student research.
neuroscientist got a The Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at FAU is the nation’s
unique look at how Florida Atlantic only university-affiliated, free-standing honors college. Located
monarch butterfly University’ s in Jupiter on the John D. MacArthur Campus of FAU, this close-
(Danaus plexippus) Harriet L. Wilkes knit, residential, highly-selective liberal arts and sciences college
caterpillars behave when food is scarce. The results look Honors College offers a distinctive all-honors curriculum and is surrounded
something like a combination of boxing and “bumper” cars. has received a by world-renowned scientific research institutes, where
With less access to their favorite food – milkweed – they $500,000 challenge undergraduates benefit from unparalleled access to research
go from docile to domineering, aggressively head-butting, gift to launch the internships. The college recently received a second consecutive
lunging and knocking aside other caterpillars to ensure Morton Research Forum, named in honor of Jeffrey S. Morton, top rating in a nationwide review of 50 public honors colleges.
their own survival. And, they are most aggressive right Ph.D., professor of political science in the Dorothy F. Schmidt
before the final stages of their metamorphosis. A lack of College of Arts and Letters and Foreign Policy Association FAU Receives NIH Grant To
nutrition during larval stages has been shown to delay larval fellow. Enhance Social Engagement
development as well as reduce adult body size, reproductive The Morton Research Forum highlights Morton and his
performance and lifespan. contributions to foreign policy by providing eight diplomacy and In Older Adults
“Aggression is common in insects, including fruit flies, interdisciplinary fellowships for honors undergraduates. Students
where single-pheromone receptors or single genes have selected into the program will receive merit-based scholarships Vibrant social
been shown to trigger their aggression,” said Alex Keene, underwritten by the challenge gift and matching donations to relationships are a
Ph.D., lead author and a professor of biological sciences, participate in a community-based, research-intensive fellowship critical component of
FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. “I decided to or a diplomacy research project. healthy aging. Strong
investigate monarch caterpillars because I was intrigued by “This generous gift will plant the seeds for a truly relationships provide
their combative behavior, which I observed first-hand in my innovative model in undergraduate research to blossom at the emotional support
own garden. They are large and easily recognizable compared Wilkes Honors College and across the university,” said Justin and well-being,
to many other insects. These are charismatic animals that Perry, Ph.D., dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College. “It promote brain health, and can even slow the progression of
everyone loves, and there’s a growing appreciation for their embodies how the power of students’ intellectual discoveries neurodegenerative diseases. However, the aging process can
potential to tell us about how the brain controls behavior.” can transcend academic boundaries in multiple ways, while create challenges for older adults in their social interactions,
For the study, published in the journal iScience, researchers bridging the gap between the daily life of the ivory towers and leading to unbalanced interactions and potentially a withdrawal
faced a number of challenges maintaining a population of its surrounding ecosystem.” from cognitive and social activities with others. Social isolation
monarchs while trying to model resource limitation. To Beginning in the next academic year, three Honors College in older adults has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
encounter these challenges, Keene and his team built an open students will be the first cohort to take part in the pilot phase of a To address these challenges, researchers from Florida Atlantic
milkweed garden behind their Boca Raton-based lab and let two-year interdisciplinary fellowship program, focused on three University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science and Christine
nature do the work of collecting caterpillars. Back in the lab, areas of significance to the South Florida region and beyond: E. Lynn College of Nursing have received a two-year, $675,000
the researchers placed caterpillars into groups with different data science and artificial intelligence, marine conservation and grant from the National Institute of Aging, National Institutes of
amounts of milkweed. The results were clear – the less food, environmental science, and healthy aging and public health. Health, to test a mathematical model designed to optimize social
the more likely caterpillars were to try to head-butt each other These areas naturally align with FAU’s strategic research and physical engagement in this population.
out of the way to get their fill. priorities and strengths. The project titled, “The Mathematics of Relatedness:
The process of getting to that result also was Five Honors College students from the Leon Charney Social Affordances in Behavioral and Cognitive Aging,”
challenging. The researchers had difficulty breeding the Diplomacy Program will be selected as Research Forum is an interdisciplinary grant that interweaves two research
monarchs in the lab and found that almost every nursery scholars, spending a semester to focus on foreign policy and efforts, combining the expertise of researchers in social and
sells their milkweed with pesticides. That’s why they world affairs. The Leon Charney Diplomacy Program, which behavioral neuroscience, mathematical physics and gerontology,
ended up growing their own milkweed. trains students in world affairs, dispute resolution and debate, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias. The objective of
To examine whether caterpillars display aggressive was established in 1996 and is a unit of FAU’s Peace, Justice the study is to identify strategies that will facilitate and enhance
behavior, Keene and collaborators quantified the presence of & Human Rights Initiative. To date, the program has won 45 social interactions with and among older adults and counter
aggressive lunges under a number of conditions, as well as the national and international awards for academic excellence. age-related decline by pinpointing activities that will allow the
effect of attacks on target conspecifics. Monarch caterpillars Morton, director of the Leon Charney Diplomacy Program, social life of older adults to flourish.
predominantly feed on milkweed and often strip entire plants will play a leadership role in providing talks and summer
bare of leaves over a two-week period. In many locations, workshops for all students. FAU Receives NIH Grant on page 21
milkweed is only available for part of the year, placing a
significant constraint on monarch development. Monarchs also
impact the milkweed plants they consume – at their largest
and hungriest phase, a single caterpillar may devour an entire CAMPBELL AND KARLIK, P.A.
milkweed leaf in under five minutes.
“If you compare a monarch caterpillar to a fruit fly where ATTORNEYS AT LAW
there are lot of larvae on one piece of rotting fruit, you’ll find
that they feed socially with little evidence of territoriality,”
said Keene. “But each of these caterpillars will at some point
in their developmental cycle encounter resource limitation Wills • Trusts • Estate Planning • Probate
because they can strip an entire milkweed of leaves.”
While observing the caterpillars, researchers noticed that Taxation • Real Estate • Corporations
the monarch’s tentacles, large mechanosensory appendages,
were not utilized when they were being combative. This
finding suggests that alternative sensory modalities, such as
pheromonal, olfactory or tactile cues that are independent of
the tentacles initiate aggression. The researchers believe that
aggression induced by limited food availability in monarch
caterpillars are likely present in many different species
throughout the animal kingdom.
“While our research showed that the caterpillars respond
aggressively to limited food, we still hope to learn more about
what drives this response in their brains, which is important
for learning more about how these responses work outside the
lab,” said Keene. “One of the fundamental problems with work
like this is that we’re testing animals in a very derived setting.
And that’s not what brains evolved to do. So now that we
have this invertebrate model in a relatively controlled setting,
but doing an ecologically relevant behavior, that becomes
important in terms of looking at the mechanism and function Diane L. KarLiK
of this behavior in more complex organisms.”
Beyond the study of aggression in caterpillars,
monarchs present an emerging model for studying the
molecular mechanisms underlying behavior and set the Tel: (561) 625-5220
stage for future investigations into the neuroethology of 3450 Northlake Boulevard Suite 210 Fax: (561) 625-5201• Mobile: (561) 797-5004
aggression in this system. Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33403 EMail: dlkarlik@aol.com
Study co-authors are Joseph Collie, Odelvys Granela, and