Sakura Roberts

Author: Sakura Roberts | Major: Biology | Semester: Spring 2023

Hello, my name is Sakura Roberts, and for the past three years I have had the honor of working in Dr. Sarah DuRant’s lab. The lab primarily focuses on physiology, maternal effects, and disease, and I first heard about it through a Zoom meeting during my sophomore year. I had always had a fascination with birds, simply because my father is a casual ornithologist, and knew that this was something I wanted to work on. I not only spoke to Dr. Erin Sauer and Dr. Sarah DuRant about the work done in the lab, but also about how they are wanting to create more opportunities for women and marginalized groups in STEM. This was very important to me, and I knew then and there that this would be the lab I joined.

My own research revolved around studying effects of maternal disease history from Mycoplasmal gallisepticum (MG) on parental behaviors and body condition outcomes of offspring. Disease is an important driver of population dynamics and can influence the evolution, behavior, reproduction, and abundance of wildlife species, and organisms often alter their behavior to mitigate environmental challenges. MG is an avian bacterial pathogen that causes chronic respiratory disease by inflammation of air passageways in poultry and eye inflammation and mortality in wild house finches, and through my research, I predicted that parents with a history of MG exposure would increase their resource provisioning, resulting in offspring that are in better body condition prior to disease exposure. I knew one day that I would want to work in conservation, and with this topic I could dive into studying how avian epidemics can have detrimental effects on important wildlife species.

How I collected my data was through extensive video monitoring of parental care behaviors of our study species, the domestic canary. We had eggs randomly distributed to foster mothers who either did or did not have prior disease exposure and looked at how each of those foster mothers provisioned, brooded, how much time they spent at the nest, and how many trips to the nest they made. In total, I watched 2669 videos that equaled out to 1334.5 hours of monitoring. It was a lot of work and very tedious, but my mentor was always there to support me through the process. Video monitoring is a great way to study behavior, but a lot of the time isn’t done this thoroughly. Sometimes, only a few hours per day or randomly chosen time slots are observed, but we wanted to make sure to observe the foster mother behaviors throughout the whole day and therefore went through videos that were recorded every 30 minutes per hour from 8am-8pm, resulting in 12 videos per day over the course of 17 days for all 22 nests we had. Needless to say, I was very happy when the data collection part of my research was over.

I ended up finding that disease does result in parental care differences, with foster mothers who recovered from MG spending more time at the nest brooding their offspring than control mothers, who increased feeding frequencies over time but in turn spent less time brooding their offspring. This was interesting to me because brooding plays an important role during early offspring development by maintaining body temperatures for chicks, and chicks that experience lower temperatures during development have increased susceptibility to diseases from impaired immune systems, lower growth rates, and negative effects on performance. This could potentially mean that if brooding is more important than feeding frequency for offspring outcomes, offspring of control mothers may suffer harsher effects of disease than those of MG foster mothers. So next, I wanted to see if there were any differences seen in offspring body conditions to prove the second part to my hypothesis that differences seen in maternal care behaviors would shape offspring outcomes.

Surprisingly, when we looked at the body condition models of offspring, we found that there was not an effect from maternal behaviors in fat scores and mass of offspring. This could possibly be because there could be advantages to frequent feeding and brooding, and both are beneficial for a body condition outcome. Though the second part of results weren’t proven, I am proud of my work done that helped aid in avian disease research and how it can contribute to conservation and reducing the effects of epidemics.

I am so thankful for my time spent in the lab with Dr. Sauer and Dr. DuRant because of the experience they gave me and how that will help me with veterinary school and any conservation exposure in the future. I’m taking a gap year starting in the fall and have received a wildlife rehabilitation and conservation internship in Naples, Florida where I will be working towards water, land, and wildlife preservation. This lab has given me the necessary tools needed to excel in my future goals, and I will be forever grateful for the guidance provided by the people there.