BUMP Undergraduates Featured on BU Today

This summer, I had the opportunity to further my skills in scientific inquiry, microscopy, and data analysis through a hands-on research internship. I worked on a project analyzing macrofaunal communities in deep-sea inactive hydrothermal vents, which involved conducting sample sorting, organizing datasets, and performing quantitative analyses in R (coding language). This experience pushed me to think more critically as a scientist. Beyond just collecting data, I had to interpret patterns and draw evidence-based conclusions. I also gained a lot of confidence in my ability to work independently and with other researchers, which has made me feel more prepared for graduate-level research. As a guest student, I was essentially an intern. This was a paid internship, with housing shared among other college undergraduates in a cohort.

As an aquarist at the New England Aquarium, my responsibilities were split broadly into two categories: animal husbandry and life-support maintenance. Animal husbandry includes tasks where you are more directly interacting with animals—e.g., preparing and providing feeds and enrichment. Life-support maintenance, on the other hand, involves everything done to sustain and operate the systems that maintain our habitats. The many tasks included checking/cleaning filtration and cooling systems; monitoring water quality parameters, like temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen; and cleaning tank substrate, surfaces, and work areas. My animal husbandry responsibilities went above and beyond what I had hoped for this opportunity. It was incredible spending so much time just observing and being close to the animals during my routine.

As a marine biology major, I enjoyed completing enrichment tasks with our giant Pacific octopus (Tako) the most. It felt like the culmination of everything I had learned (in both life-support maintenance and animal husbandry) to work with an animal that requires such specialized care. I could appreciate just how much work went into maintaining safe parameters and an enriching environment. I received a stipend to support my internship through BU’s Yawkey Nonprofit Internship Program.

Over the summer, I conducted an observational study to determine if clown anemonefish exhibit lunar cycles of reproduction in laboratory systems. In their natural habitat, these fish have regular lunar cycles of reproduction and breed in accordance to the moon phase. After six months of data collection, preliminary findings show that they exhibit the same lunar cycle of reproduction in labs, despite not being exposed to lunar light and tides influenced by the moon. This finding, in the absence of any obvious lunar cues, is remarkable, and raises questions about the extrinsic cues and internal biological clocks that might enable this behavior.

This research, conducted in the Buston Marine Evolutionary Ecology Laboratory, makes up my honors thesis. I will use the data I have collected through this research and the literature I have reviewed to write up and defend my thesis next spring. I am better prepared to create a scientific paper on my findings after conducting this research, which was supported by a stipend provided by Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).