As a student at Marietta, MaLisa Spring ’14 took every opportunity to expand on her knowledge of insects, particularly bees.
Since earning her degree at Marietta, Spring has been immersed in her bee research and is currently a Graduate Research Fellow at The Ohio State University. She attended a bee course in Arizona, where she was able to collect bees that aren’t found in this region of the country.
She is working on two main research projects at Ohio State: Urban green-space design — benefits to pollinator communities; and Rain Gardens — stacked ecosystem services.
The green-space design project looks at the “impact of urban green-space design on plant-pollinator interaction networks,” Spring says.
The city of Cleveland spends more than $3 million annually to manage more than 22,000 vacant lots.
“These lots can potentially provide valuable ecosystem services in terms of biocontrol and pollination services. Determining whether a less resource intense management strategy could have positive impacts on local pollinator communities is paramount,” says Spring, who earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology at Marietta. “This study will compare five landscape management strategies: fleur de lawn, a low diversity forb planting, a high diversity forb planting, monarch meadows, and control lots of the current management strategy. Moreover, this project will look at the impacts of each management strategy on pollen and parasites loads on different insects.”
The second project involves bees but is also examining the water quality issue with storm-water runoff within urban areas, namely in Cleveland.
“Rainfall greater than an inch during a storm can cause the combined sewer system in Cleveland to overflow into Lake Erie,” Spring says. “To combat this effluent, several organizations are cooperating to examine infrastructure strategies, which reduce storm-water runoff. To evaluate the impact of green infrastructure investment, rain gardens were installed on formerly vacant land in the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland.”
The study also will look at how this affects beneficial insect communities, both the bees that visit the rain gardens and other beneficial insects.
Marietta College’s Dr. Katy Lustofin and Dr. Dave McShaffrey— both entomologists in the Biology Department — were crucial in helping Spring develop her passion for bee research.
In fact, while many seniors were celebrating with friends during Senior Week 2014, Spring took a trip out of state to continue work on her Senior Capstone project — a project that she had already successfully completed for academic credit a couple weeks earlier.
Spring’s Bee Diversity and Pollen Constancy in Washington County, Ohio, Capstone Project began during the spring semester of her junior year, but her interest in bees was first piqued when she was completing a summer internship in Minnesota a year earlier. That internship had her studying insect diversity in biofuels crops and also included an individual project on lady beetle diversity in the region.
“By the end of my field work, I had collected 2,756 bees from three Washington County sites, including the College’s Beiser Field Station, (the Washington County) Career Center, and on campus,” Spring says. “We found 130 species, eight of which were state records, which means they were never previously found in Ohio. There were several other county records in addition to the state records. Why is this significant? When you study diversity and population, you better understand the overall range of different organisms. In Ohio, we’re supposed to have 400 bee species. Research will help better understand the current distributions in previously unstudied areas.”
Lustofin says that Spring’s research may reveal that Washington County is a bee diversity hot spot and that her work may in fact be a springboard for much more research.
Spring’s work also involved identifying the pollen loads that the bees carried, which shows not only what different species of bees are pollinating certain plant types, but how effective they are at pollination.
Because Spring had experience collecting samples, her advisor didn’t have to show her the process. Lustofin did assist her student during many actual bee collections, particularly when Spring spent six weeks in Thailand the summer before her senior year for a separate research project with Marietta College faculty and students. Lustofin and Spring began the sampling process together in order to keep it consistent, and then Lustofin collected bees alone for the six weeks her student was out of country.
“The rest of the summer, she sampled by herself,” Lustofin says. “In the fall, MaLisa went with me or with intro biology students to help her. We offered extra credit to them and made sure that MaLisa also talked to them about her project and capstone process in general. Or occasionally we split the days — she might set up the traps and I would collect the next day or vice versa. It was pretty labor intensive, taking several hours before dawn. For a brief period when the dorms were closed, she even spent the night at my house so that we could get up early, about 4 a.m., to go collect.”
If collecting more than 2,700 bees wasn’t difficult enough, Spring then had to focus on identifying different species.
“Although I confirmed identification of her specimens, MaLisa did all the identification herself,” Lustofin says. “We deliberately used different sources for identification, just to make sure that we were correct. Additionally, MaLisa reached out to a listserv group and was able to send some bees to Sam Droege at the U.S. Geological Society in Beltsville, Md., for confirmation. Actually, we lucked out there, because one of Sam’s researchers has a sister nearby and so she actually came into our lab on a Saturday to meet with MaLisa and me to confirm some of our IDs. MaLisa also arranged to come out to the USGS lab during senior week in May.”
Both Lustofin and McShaffrey helped connect Spring with bee experts and brought her to conferences where she could meet with entomologists who were experts on bees. One of those contacts, whom she met during a statewide conference, ended up being her current graduate school adviser.
“Her trip to Maryland was last spring during Senior Week,” McShaffrey says. “She went to Maryland to identify more bees even though her Capstone was officially over, the grades were in and her classmates were partying. She also started her summer work at OSU literally the day after graduation.”
Meeting with Droege was a true pleasure for Spring.
“I went to his lab and he set aside some time to double-check my collection,” Spring says. “He sees a lot of collections and he said he liked mine because it had such diversity. He took photos of some of my samples and confirmed that I had a gynandromorphy, a half-male, half-female bee.”
Spring worked on publishing three papers from her senior research project, focusing on the bee diversity aspect, the gynandromorph bee, and the pollen loads of her collection.
Her dedication to entomology and the amount of work she puts into her research doesn’t come as a surprise to her Marietta professors. Rather, these are points of pride.
“MaLisa gave a talk at the Ohio Natural History Conference last spring,” McShaffrey says. “She followed a speaker who is very well known in the state and who gave an excellent talk. I was sitting with some people (who didn’t know that MaLisa was my student) who commented on how much better her talk was than the preceding one (as well as others given that day), and one person commented that they didn’t know Marietta had a graduate program. MaLisa was a standout in that way. She also got a prestigious fellowship at OSU and won a competitive national award for undergraduate research in entomology.”
Lustofin tells a strikingly similar story to McShaffrey when asked about Spring.
“Honestly, working with MaLisa was more like collaboration with a colleague than it was advising a student — she is that self-motivated and enthusiastic,” Lustofin says. “When we went to the International Pollinator Conference in August at Penn State, more than one of my friends there commented to me, ‘I didn't know Marietta College had grad students.’ At least one person there thought this was her Master’s dissertation project — she’s that good.”
GI SMITH
