BIOLOGICAL
SCIENCES
HIGHLIGHTS
Jack Feminella, Department Chairman
Auburn University Offers Students
Intensive Study-Abroad and
Research Opportunities in
Costa Rica
Auburn students interested in an intensive studyabroad program in one of the world’s most lush
and adventure-filled locations can take advantage
of the Organization for Tropical Studies, which
owns and operates three biological field stations in
Costa Rica: La Selva, Las Cruces, and Palo Verde.
OTS is a non-profit consortium that includes 63
universities and research institutions from the U.S.,
Latin America, and Australia. Auburn University
is the only school in the state that is a member of
OTS, and since joining the consortium in 1987,
Auburn students have had access to educational,
research, and funding opportunities in Costa Rica
that are not available to non-member institutions.
Nicole Garrison, a doctoral student in the
Department of Biological Sciences, spent time
in January at the OTS field station La Selva,
participating in the two-week Ecology and
Evolution of Arachnids course taught by her major
professor, Jason Bond, Auburn University OTS
delegate.
“It’s a really unique experience, and if you have any
interest in field ecology and biology, it’s perfect,”
said Garrison. “If you are unsure, you will know
by the end of it if whether you are interested in a
career that involves a lot of field work, because it is
very intense. And you are out there in the thick of
it with the ants, and the wasps, and the jaguars, and
everything, so it’s a very enlightening experience.”
Undergraduates can spend a semester abroad at
any of the three stations studying topics such as:
Global Health: Tropical Medicine and Public
Health; Tropical Biology; or Tropical Biology on
a Changing Planet. Graduate students have even
more options, with anywhere from 12 to 15 courses
being offered on a regular basis.
“The biggest advantage to an Auburn student is
participation in the OTS Tropical Biology and
Tropical Ecology courses. I think any student that
you talk to will tell you, it was a life-transforming
experience,” said Bond. “It’s just a transformational
experience to work in the tropics and to be in one
of the most diverse habitats on the planet, and
OTS is an amazing setting for that.”
The three OTS-run field stations in Costa Rica
offer logistics, lodging, meals, and necessary
resources, such as classroom and research facilities,
to students and faculty participating in courses or
research. Additionally, because Auburn University
is a member institution, students receive a discount
to participate in OTS programs, and graduate
students who participate become eligible to apply
for OTS fellowships and grant funding. Over the
last decade, more than $30,000 has been awarded
to Auburn students by OTS.
Garrison said a typical day began shortly after
sunrise as participants gathered for breakfast.
Following breakfast, they attended a morning
lecture until lunch, and the afternoons were
filled with field research. At 4 p.m., the group
would gather again for a lecture, eat dinner, and
then conduct more field research until late in the
evening.
“I think the class definitely opened up a lot more
opportunities. Meeting the people in the class was
a big step, because I feel like I really grew really
close to them in two weeks because of the intensity
of the experience and the one-on-one contact
that I had with faculty members,” said Garrison.
“So I feel like the communication with other
people in the field, particularly with the ones from
South America that I probably never would have
encountered anywhere at a meeting up here, in
Alabama, was really good, and it’s really interesting
to get more of a perspective on the field from
them.”
In addition to Costa Rica, OTS recently initiated
programs in South Africa where students have
a choice to study either African Ecology and
Conservation or Global Health Issues in South
Africa.
For more information on OTS, contact Bond at
[email protected] or visit the OTS website at
http://ots.ac.cr/.
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Journey/2014
Journey/2014
Jason Bond: The Evolution,
Systematics and Taxonomy of
Arachnids and Myriapods
that is diversified throughout southern Africa.”
In addition to millipedes and beetles, Bond
is a leading expert on spiders, specifically
trapdoor spiders. In the last several years, he has
discovered 36 new species of trapdoor spider,
including one he discovered in Auburn and
named Myrmekiaphila tigris.
Millipedes were among the first terrestrial animals,
dating as far back as 400 million years ago. Among
the ancient group of species, about 20,000 have
been described, and according to Jason Bond,
professor of biological sciences and director of the
Auburn University Museum of Natural History,
there are potentially many more undiscovered
species of millipede waiting to be identified.
Bond specializes in in the evolution, systematics,
and taxonomy of arachnids and myriapods, and
he recently received a three-year, $548,000 grant
from the National Science Foundation’s Division of
Environmental Biology for his research proposal,
“Millipede Systematics: Developing phylogenomic,
classification, and taxonomic resources for the
future.” The grant funding allows Bond to conduct
research on millipedes that are in the arthropod
class Diplopoda, a species that is distributed
worldwide in nearly every biome.
Despite their ecological importance as
decomposers in forests, wealth of diversity
with an estimated 20,000 to 80,000 species,
and prominence as chemical warriors owing to
their vast array of defense secretions, the group
is woefully understudied. Bond and his team
are working to revise the current ordinal and
family-level classification systems using a modern
phylogenomic framework based on next-generation
sequence data and then hope to employ these
data to explore the evolution of chemical defense
secretions and their precursors.
This past summer, Bond travelled to Costa Rica to
the Organization for Tropical Studies Field Station
in La Selva, where he collected millipede specimens
for his research.
“We surprisingly know very little about millipedes,
such as how the various groups are related,
why they produce defensive secretions, and the
chemicals they produce; and it is still an open
question as to why they secrete defensive chemicals
at all. Was it for encounters of molds and microbes
in the soil? Or, was it a defense against invertebrate
predators? Did it evolve once or independently?
And then there are some basics we do not
understand, like we do not have a good taxonomic
key to the families,” said Bond. “Millipedes are
He is also conducting studies into orb spiders,
focusing on evolutionary history, silk production,
and webs.
hard to tell apart, and there are not a lot of people
working on them.”
Bond also recently traveled to southern Africa and
spent time in the Namib Desert studying a species
of beetle, onymacris.
“They live on the dunes in the Namib Desert,
which is a very arid and dry environment. They
have a mechanism to collect water called ‘fog
basking,’” explained Bond. “When the fog rolls
in off the south Atlantic to dunes, they run out
and essentially bask in the fog and collect water
droplets on their body surface. It’s a group of beetle
“We have made some exciting discoveries about
when and how orb webs evolved,” said Bond.
“Since the early 1980s, scientists believed the
orb web spiders shared the same evolutionary
history. We discovered that is not the case. Now
we know that the spiders that build orb webs
do not all share a common ancestor and the orb
web developed much earlier in spider history
than we previously thought.”
When Bond reflects on what drew him to study
spiders, he notes the remarkable diversity of the
animals and their ability to produce silk.
“Spider silk has properties like extensibility and
tensile strength that are on par with materials
like Kevlar® and steel, yet spiders are able to
produce these, as proteins, naturally,” said Bond.
“My early interests were on the evolution of
spider silk production but quickly expanded
to studying spider diversity. Spiders are an
incredibly diverse group with more than 42,000
described species that are found in almost every
terrestrial ecosystem. And they or their close
relatives have been around since the Devonian,
which was more than 400 million years ago.”
Bond has two master’s students and four
doctoral students currently working with him in
his lab.
For more information on Bond, visit his
website at this address: http://www.auburn.edu/
academic/cosam/faculty/biology/bond/.
College of Sciences and Mathematics
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