Research Assistant in Dr. Craig Guyer's Lab at Auburn UniversityMy most recent work also involved the widest variety of tasks and responsibilities. Several times a week I went into swamps around Lee and Macon county -- often in the Tuskegee National Forest -- to help monitor the local herp populations. This involved checking nets for turtles and salamanders, but primarily hunting for cottonmouths (
Agkistrodon piscivorus) from 8 PM through midnight. Physical measurements were taken from all specimens before they were released, and blood was drawn to test whether the animals were a vector for Eastern Equine Encephalitis.


Auburn also has a large preserved herp collection. I spent many hours in the museum taking measurements and tissue samples to record the seasonal sexual development of male timber rattlers (
Crotalus horridus) and female copperheads (
Agkistrodon contortrix).



Additionally, I embedded organ segments from the timber rattlers in paraffin with a spin tissue processor and made slides with a rotary microtome, which I then dyed, photographed, and measured using the software ImageJ. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed being a part of the process from field work and sample collection all the way to presentation. The tissue on the right is a slide I made of the sexual segment of the kidney (ssk) -- a specialized reproductive organ found in male squamates.



I was pleased to present my findings to other professionals at
ALAPARC (Alabama Chapter of Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation). Below are just a few of the images showing part of my Excel datasheets, one of several data graphs, and some of the slides from my PowerPoint presentation. You can also see a testes slide I processed and the three measurements I took from structures in that particular tissue.
My presentation discussed the mating patterns of North American rattlesnakes, the physiological markers of these patterns, and how these relate to the information I collected from male timber rattlers (
C. horridus). I used my own findings and examples from other North American rattlesnakes to suggest that their mating patterns were likely a result of phylogenetic constraints rather than the environmental gradient explanation suggested by the Tropical Origins Model (Robert D. Aldridge, David Duvall (
2002) EVOLUTION OF THE MATING SEASON IN THE PITVIPERS OF NORTH AMERICA. Herpetological Monographs: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1-25.).





