GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Whether by buzzing, singing, cawing or hissing, plenty of animals boast their own form of communication. But researchers now hope to unlock a common predator-prey language found in insects and mammals: echolocation in hawkmoths and bats.

“Moths and bats are completely unrelated yet they are talking to each other,” said principal investigator Akito Kawahara, assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “We can’t hear it, but they certainly can, so we’re trying to do some experiments where we let the two organisms fly together and see how they interact.”

The National Science Foundation recently awarded Kawahara $260,000 to research hawkmoths’ use of echolocation as a defense mechanism against predatory bats. The grant will fund research in Ecuador, French Guinea and Borneo, molecular biology lab work at the Florida Museum, and experiments at a live bat cage in Boise, Idaho, run by co-principal investigator Jesse Barber, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Boise State University.

“There isn’t much work like this done on insects, and it has mostly focused on grasshoppers and crickets communicating with each other,” Kawahara said. “Right now, we have a really confusing ball of information – we have to try to untangle it and determine the many communication mechanisms within the group.”

Previous research shows other moths use sonar defense against bat predators by “jamming” the bats’ echolocation with a sound that confuses them. Based on the fossil record, interaction between moths and bats dates back at least 50 million years and researchers hope to understand how their coexistence may have affected their evolution, including the development of ears in hawkmoths, which are found in their mouths. Hawkmoths make sounds using their genitals and another aspect of the project will address preliminary evidence they use this form of communication in mating.

“We don’t really understand when and how sound production and the ability to hear arose in hawkmoths, but it looks like one led to the other and we don’t know which came first,” Kawahara said.

Hawkmoths are among the fastest and most proficient flying insects. Unlike butterflies, which land on a flower to drink nectar, some hawkmoths hover in midair, similar to hummingbirds. They have wingspans that can reach 6 inches and a curled proboscis, or tongue, up to 10 inches long.

“We’re not only trying to understand the evolution of sound production and hearing, but also the evolution of nectar feeding,” said Kawahara, who will primarily focus on the molecular biology research for the project. “By using genetics, we can build an evolutionary tree to see when and how these things have happened.”

More than 1,000 species of hawkmoths occur worldwide, with the highest diversity in tropical and sub-tropical regions. Researchers will introduce hawkmoths to live bat cages and use devices to measure the different echolocation frequencies and document patterns in as many species as possible. High-speed video cameras will create 3-D reconstructions of confrontations and Kawahara said he also hopes to use the footage for educational and outreach purposes in the future.

“There’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on at night,” Kawahara said. “It’s just like a battle out there – bats versus moths – we just don’t know much about it because it happens in the dark and we can’t hear it.”

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Source: Akito Kawahara, 352-273-2018, kawahara@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Danielle Torrent, dtorrent@flmnh.ufl.edu
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — With $800,000 from the National Science Foundation, Florida Museum of Natural History conservation biologist Scott Robinson is researching bird ranges in the Andes Mountains.

Robinson is leading a team of about 20 researchers measuring ideal temperatures for different species’ survival, studying how successfully the birds nest and to what extent predators dictate their existence. With this data, scientists hope to understand which Neotropical bird species will be able to move upslope as temperatures increase with global warming.

Scott Robinson

“These are birds that are likely to be very vulnerable to climate change because they’re very specialized to a narrow climate niche,” said Robinson, Ordway Eminent Scholar at the Florida Museum. “We’re trying to determine if they’re simply living where they’re optimally adapted, or if there are competitors replacing each other. No one’s really tested that.”

During the end of the dry season, from August through November, scientists and volunteers work along the Manu Road in southeastern Peru, the location of earth’s most diverse known bird community. The area is home to more than 1,000 species, and Robinson hopes to collect data for more than 150 of them.

“We’re trying to work on a relatively undisturbed gradient – the land around this road is owned by conservation organizations, so it goes through intact forest,” Robinson said. “Here’s a chance to study the environmental needs of these species without direct human disturbance.”

Researchers determine the birds’ ideal temperature requirements with the FoxBox from Sable Systems, a portable, generator-run chamber that measures how much energy birds burn in different environments.

“These metabolic chambers regulate the airflow and temperature of birds at night when they’re sleeping,” Robinson said. “By slowly raising and lowering the temperature, we can measure the concentration of oxygen entering and elevating the chamber to see the amount of energy the bird is burning. You’re looking for the thermo-neutral zone, where the bird doesn’t have to expend any extra energy to maintain its body temperature.”

The data will help researchers understand whether species will be able nest higher on mountain slopes as temperatures rise or be forced out because of predators.

“Some of these species can just move upslope – the problem is, there’s something else up there already,” Robinson said. “Some birds will just get pushed off the top, or get squeezed in the middle of the mountain. We’re trying to figure out which species are in trouble and which can take care of themselves.”

The three-year project, funded earlier this month, also involves conservation and education outreach to local communities, including presentations promoting ecotourism and environmental awareness, Robinson said.

“As scientists, we’ve come to realize somewhat belatedly that by ignoring outreach, we’re cutting off our connection to people,” Robinson said. “People are interested in the results of science, but when it comes to actually doing science, the United States isn’t producing as many scientists as it used to, so I think we need to worry a lot about that. Any kind of sustained research and conservation in South America has to involve the people that live in those areas – they have to be a part of it and they have to want to do it.”

Mark Chapell of the University of California, Riverside, is co-principal investigator for the project. Other collaborators include Florida Museum graduate student Gustavo Londono and Jill Jankowski, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia and Florida Museum research associate. Volunteer researchers selected from around the world include students from South American universities and the University of Florida.

“Finding the nests, catching the birds, measuring their oxygen rates – this is a very, very labor-intensive project,” Robinson said. “But the great thing about birds is people love them, especially college-age people. We can get really skilled volunteers for this project, as long as we feed them and give them a place to stay, they will just be totally happy they’re working in the Andes and having a grand-old time.”

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Source: Scott Robinson, 352-273-1965, srobinson@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Danielle Torrent, dtorrent@flmnh.ufl.edu
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Florida Museum of Natural History researcher Neill Wallis recently received a $55,000 National Science Foundation grant to analyze and digitally document pottery made by prehistoric people of the Deep South.

The grant will help Wallis analyze Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery used by hunter-gatherers of northern Florida, Georgia and eastern Alabama from A.D. 100 to 800. Wallis began the project this summer with $20,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation used to conduct neutron activation and petrographic analyses. The three-year NSF grant will fund preparation of the vessels, database development, travel expenses, photographing the designs and radiocarbon dating soot on the pottery.

Florida Museum of Natural History researcher Neill Wallis analyzes Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery used by hunter-gatherers of northern Florida, Georgia and eastern Alabama from A.D. 100 to 800.

“The archaeology review panel placed this proposal in the top, highest-priority category,” said John Yellen, NSF archaeology program director.

The research will expand the work Wallis conducted for his book, “The Swift Creek Gift: Vessel Exchange on the Atlantic Coast,” published in February. Featured in April by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Library, the book showed significance could be found in seemingly meaningless items, such as cooking pots that were found to be exchanged long distances.

The creation of an online database of the material will help researchers distinguish and analyze population migration patterns, marriage alliances and exchange. Wallis said he hopes to compile at least 40 radiocarbon dates in pottery collected from 24 sites.

“The radiocarbon dating will be extremely valuable because we don’t have that many dates for Swift Creek for the middle-to-late Woodland period,” Wallis said. “That will be helpful for just tying down the chronology while looking at all these sites.”

Swift Creek pottery is unique because artifacts sharing the same impressions, created by stamping a paddle into a vessel before it is fired, can be traced to specific sites. The designs are like “fingerprints,” enabling researchers to map where ancient people lived, the distances they traveled and with whom they interacted, Wallis said.

The samples are from the Woodland period, which spanned 1,000 B.C. to A.D. 1,000, a time of considerable cultural development and increased burial mound ceremonialism, Wallis said.

“Around 1,500 years ago, people were organized in ways we don’t understand that well,” Wallis said. “At a level of social organization somewhere between large chiefdoms and small bands of hunter-gatherers, anthropologists don’t have a very good idea of how those people interacted or how exchange or mobility shaped their society. This pottery allows us to establish patterns in the movement of ancient people or the movement of objects in ways no other artifacts can.”

About one-third of the samples used for the project are housed in the Florida Museum’s collections. Other contributors include the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research, the University of South Florida, the University of Georgia and Valdosta State University. The project responsibilities and total NSF award of $87,000 is shared with University of South Florida anthropologist Thomas Pluckhahn.

“This will be useful to many archaeologists working in Florida, Georgia or Alabama – there are a lot of sites that have Swift Creek pottery,” Wallis said. “It’s really going to give us a sense of how hunter-gatherers interacted with other hunter-gatherers.”

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Source: Neill Wallis, office: 352-273-1920, cell: 352-745-6888, nwallis@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Danielle Torrent, dtorrent@flmnh.ufl.edu
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

Available to anyone online, the natural history data and its increased accessibility will help researchers identify gaps in scientific knowledge and could assist government agencies and others making decisions related to climate change, conservation, invasive species, biodiversity and other biological issues.

“There are probably a billion specimens in the U.S., but information isn’t easily accessible,” said Larry Page, principal investigator of the five-year project and a research scientist at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “This program is about making that information available to researchers, educators, policymakers and the general public – anyone who wants it.”

UF will receive $7.2 million for the project, which also includes UF’s College of Engineering Advanced Computing Information Systems Laboratory. The college will work with FSU’s Center for Information Management and Scientific Communication and create software and databases the nationwide participants will use to transfer and store the data. The information in the digitized collections will include field notes, photographs, 3-D images and information on associated organisms, geographic distribution, environmental habitat and specimen DNA samples.

“It will be possible to ask questions whose answers depend on the ability to relate information from multiple collections at multiple periods of time on the planet,” said co-investigator José Fortes, director of UF’s Advanced Computing and Information Systems Laboratory.

Co-investigator Greg Riccardi of FSU said the impact of biodiversity is affecting current policies related to climate change, conservation and customs.

“When a bug crawls out of a crate in a shipping warehouse, customs officials need to determine if that species will create environmental problems and what to do about it.”

Florida Museum vertebrate paleontology curator and co-investigator Bruce MacFadden has studied fossils and climate change for than 30 years. More recently, his research has focused on public education, including how to engage and interest students and museum visitors in science.

“Ten years from now, if a kid plowing up a field in Iowa finds a fossil horse tooth, and he wants to compare it to fossil specimens in real museum collections, he will be able to download images and other information from his home computer,” MacFadden said.

The award also will fund a new undergraduate course on bioinformatics, fellowships for graduate students and sabbatical programs for at-risk junior faculty at UF. A website, museum exhibit and social media will allow researchers to document their activities and innovations, as well as communicate with museum visitors and groups interested in digitized natural history data.

“It’s basically bringing science to the face of the public, and we think it’s going to be really important as we continue to address issues related to the loss of biodiversity,” said co-investigator Pamela Soltis, Florida Museum curator of molecular systematic and evolutionary genetics. “It seems like the more connected people are to biodiversity, the more they’ll care about its conservation.”

The grant is part of the NSF Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program. The other institutions selected by NSF will receive two- to four-year grants to fund the digitization process.

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Source: Larry Page, 352-256-1889, lpage1@flmnh.ufl.edu
Pam Soltis, 352-359-0558, psoltis@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Leeann Bright
Media Contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Florida Museum of Natural History graduate student Nicholas “Nic” Miles recently received a $13,500 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant to study carnivorous pitcher plants.

Miles will study three pitcher plant families from Australia, Southeast Asia and the Americas to determine if leaves evolved from a flat to a tube-like structure the same way in all three.

“Pitchers are an amazing adaptation for plants, and their evolution is even more amazing because they evolved at three independent times during the history of plants,” said Miles, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in botany.

Miles will use virus-induced gene silencing, inserting a gene using a virus to suppress another gene, to develop his method. By inserting genes into the pitcher plant genome, he can stop the development of different plant structures. This will show what genes control different functions in the plant.

Miles is the first researcher to develop this technique in carnivorous plants, said Pamela Soltis, Florida Museum curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics, and Miles’ adviser.

“Nic’s project is a really exciting synthesis of evolutionary biology, genetic development and plant form,” Soltis said. “His research should tell us whether or not there is more than one way to make a pitcher.”

His research may reveal ways to alter specific genes to perform different functions, such as producing medicinal chemicals. Some carnivorous plants develop chemicals used in cough suppressants, and pitcher plants could potentially be genetically altered to produce and secrete such chemicals inside their pitchers.

Pitcher plants thrive in sunny climates and nutrient-poor, waterlogged soil, including bogs found in northwest Florida. The plants attract and trap insects through bright colors, nectar secretion and waxy inner walls that prevent them from escaping. The plants release enzymes to digest their prey, which provide vital nutrients to the plants.

Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants provide partial support for projects to improve the quality of research in biological sciences.

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Source: Pamela Soltis, 352-273-1964, psoltis@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Alyssa Wang
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Florida Museum of Natural History student François Michonneau recently received a $15,000 National Science Foundation grant to research sea cucumbers in Japan.

The NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant program provides partial support for projects to improve the quality of research in the biological sciences. Michonneau said his research will lead to a better understanding of the history of species diversification in the sea.

“Studying sea cucumbers is a good starting point because they provide lots of evidence about evolution,” Michonneau said.

The two-year project will also help document marine invertebrates in Japan to help scientists evaluate future marine health, as well as contribute to an inventory of the marine invertebrate fauna of Okinawa in general, particularly sea cucumbers.

“Francois is an exceptional student and analytical biologist,” said Florida Museum malacology curator Gustav Paulay, who is supervising Michonneau’s research. “His mathematical and biological skills complement his amazing understanding of species and animals.”

Michonneau will focus on three different groups of sea cucumbers that live in a variety of environments and water depths, and said that Okinawa is one of the best locations to collect all three.

He plans to examine the relationships between these sea cucumbers by combining physical evidence from the specimens he collects, with a complete DNA sequencing to determine if they are different species, subspecies or hybrid species.

Michonneau will work with Tohru Naruse, University of the Ryukyus assistant professor for the Transdisciplinary Research Organization for Subtropical and Island Studies. Naruse runs a laboratory conducting biodiversity research projects in the islands and will lend his assistance and local expertise to Michonneau.

“If these three sea cucumbers turn out to be completely different species, rather than subspecies, it would mean there has been really rapid creation of new species,” Michonneau said. “This diversification would be happening maybe 10 times faster than other oceanic creatures.”

Sea cucumbers, found worldwide, are some of the most abundant creatures in the sea and often make up a large portion of the animal population in deep waters. Michonneau said sea cucumber species diversity is underestimated and more research is necessary to better understand the biodiversity of reef ecosystems.

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Source: Gustav Paulay, 352-273-1948, paulay@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Logan Gerber
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Florida and two other institutions $2.7 million to conduct a global inventory of the largest order of freshwater fishes, including some of the most commercially important fish worldwide.

The four-year grant is part of the NSF Planetary Biodiversity Inventory initiative, which began in 2003 and aims to identify and catalog every species on Earth by 2025.

Scientists and students from UF, Auburn University and St. Louis University, with help from about 50 other researchers around the world, will search for undiscovered species and study known species in the order Cypriniformes (pronounced sy-PRIN-uh-FOR-meez). They expect to describe about 1,000 new species in this order, which includes minnows, carp, loaches and suckers.

“Through this inventory, we will gain a better understanding of how diverse cypriniforms are and how they fit into freshwater ecosystems,” said Larry Page, the study’s principal investigator and ichthyology curator at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “We will use this information to study the evolutionary relationships of these species and gain a better understanding of how biological communities form and persist.”

Page said identifying the fish is a priority because of their geographic and biological diversity. Many are popular in the pet trade and some are raised for human and pet consumption.

“The top five fishes used for aquaculture worldwide are cypriniforms,” Page said. “Aquaculture is an $86 billion-a-year business and nearly half of all fish consumed worldwide are farm-raised.”

Cypriniforms are found on every continent except Antarctica, Australia and South America. Researchers will focus most of their work in tropical Africa and Asia where diversity is highest and new species are most likely to be discovered. Teams will capture and identify new species and produce descriptions, web pages and interactive identification keys with information about their ecological characteristics and geographic distribution, Page said.

This information can be used to identify species with diminishing populations, develop conservation strategies and provide a foundation for further studies.

Study co-investigator Jonathan Armbruster, an associate professor and curator of fishes at Auburn University, said about 6 percent, or 4,000 species, of all vertebrates are cypriniforms, making this group of fishes nearly as diverse as mammals.

“You need to know what is out there before you can conserve anything,” Armbruster said. “In much of the world, we aren’t even close to determining this.”

Page said museum and institutional collections will also be studied in the search for unidentified species.

Page, who has studied fish for more than 30 years, received and directed another NSF Planetary Biodiversity Initiative grant in 2003 to inventory catfishes worldwide. He is the only researcher to receive two of the awards. Scientists on the first project described 1,000 new catfish species and created websites that greatly expanded the information available on freshwater fishes.

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Source: Larry Page, office: 352-273-1952; cell: 352-256-1889, lpage@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Leeann Bright
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

The university’s Florida Museum of Natural History received $3.8 million to study the history of climate change and biodiversity in Panama, and the College of Engineering received $3.1 million to study multiphase fluid mechanics with leading institutes in Japan and France.

“One of the primary goals of the project is to build internationally competent researchers among future U.S. scientists through innovative research and learning experiences,” said Doug Jones, director and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum and principal investigator on the museum’s grant.

Students and researchers participating in the museum grant will collect fossils from deposits excavated from the Panama Canal during construction to widen and straighten the channel and build new locks. The project will expand researchers’ understanding of global changes that occurred when the Isthmus of Panama formed, creating a land bridge between North America and South America.

The five-year grants emphasize the importance of international cooperation in research and education projects. The Florida Museum and College of Engineering hope to build long- lasting partnerships with their international counterparts that could lead to work on future projects.

“An important outcome is the generation of globally sensitive, globally educated, 21st century students,” said Ranga Narayanan, College of Engineering professor and distinguished teacher-scholar and principal investigator for the engineering grant.

The engineering project is the first NSF international research and education grant on multiphase fluid mechanics, which studies fluid behavior and motion when a liquid interacts with another liquid, solid or gas. The study will examine flow patterns and instabilities in fluids, why those patterns occur and how they may be controlled.

“Virtually everything you see around you that is manufactured is affected by multiphase flows,” Narayanan said. “Take for example the semi-conductor chips in your computer or the potato chips that you like to munch on.”

The research has potential applications for many industries, including space exploration, drug delivery, energy production and materials processing, with an economic impact of tens of billions of dollars annually, Narayanan said.

Jones described the museum program as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because of the large amount of sediment being exposed during the Panama Canal construction project, and the fossil record those sediments contain.

“The marine connection between the Atlantic and Pacific was severed simultaneously with the rise of the Panama Isthmus, changing oceanic circulation and ushering in a new climate regime affecting the entire planet.” Jones said. “Sediments also record the evolution of tropical biodiversity as well as the mixing of faunas and floras in Central America as they migrated from North and South America.”

Of the 500 institutions that applied, 83 were invited to submit full proposals, and 15 projects received funding. NSF has not announced the other institution to receive two grants.

The Florida Museum is partnering with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution, Panama; the New Mexico Museum of Natural History; Florida State University, Panama Canal Campus; Biomuseo, Panama; Universidad de Panama; Sociedad Mastozoologica de Panama; and Autoridad del Canal de Panama for the project.

“It’s a cooperative effort among institutions to learn about the paleontology of Panama and educate people both in Panama and the U.S.,” said Gary Morgan, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and co-investigator on the museum grant.

Researchers and students also will develop a museum exhibit based on the findings.

“We envision a 1,000-square-foot, bilingual traveling exhibit tentatively called ‘Panama Canal Discoveries,’ ” Jones said. “It will feature some of the interesting fossil discoveries from the project and provide context to the significance and implications of these fossils.”

The College of Engineering is partnering with Florida State University, five French universities and five Japanese institutions. The French partners are the universities of Paris, Lille, Poitiers, Marseille and Toulouse. The Japanese institutions include the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo University of Science, Kyoto University and Tohoku University.

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Source: Doug Jones, 352-273-1902, dsjones@flmnh.ufl.edu
Ranga Narayanan, 352-392-9103, ranga@che.ufl.edu
Writer: Leeann Bright
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

Scientists at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History and Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences recently received a $494,509 National Science Foundation grant to develop “Call the Wild,” a project that will encourage zoo visitors to expand their trip and their understanding of science through the use of mobile technology applications.

“We want to creatively engage visitors in learning how science works – for example, that science knowledge continues to grow and change, and science is a collaborative and creative process,” said project leader Betty Dunckel, director of the Florida Museum’s Center for Informal Science Education. “We are using cell phones, which are most frequently thought of as communication tools, as learning tools.”

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens are project partners that will provide a setting to test learning through mobile device use.

The team conducted surveys on how visitors typically use their cell phones at the Jacksonville Zoo and Toledo (Ohio) Zoo earlier this year. The data will help determine how audio calls, texts or smart phone applications could best be applied as educational tools and engage visitors in learning about how science and scientific processes of discovery work.

“Call the Wild” will test different text and visuals to see if visitors enjoy using cell phones to understand the science that takes place throughout the zoo. UF researchers and staff from the Maryland-based Institute for Learning Innovation will interview Jacksonville Zoo visitors to explore how to most effectively measure their understanding of science concepts.

“Zoos are a social setting, but they’re also centers of research, especially for local species,” said project co-investigator Jaret Daniels, an assistant curator at the Florida Museum’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. “With ‘Call the Wild,’ we hope to show that everyone can enjoy the wildlife on display while appreciating the valuable research scientists conduct in the same setting.”

Once mobile device-based kiosks are set up at an outdoor venue, tracking technology already built into most phones will allow investigators to record how visitors interact with the kiosks and which features are most popular. In addition, project researchers will be present at each station to observe their use and answer questions. The team expects to finish its background research and begin developing kiosks by the end of the year. The first kiosks are slated for temporary installation and monitoring at the Jacksonville Zoo early next year. New kiosks with different texts and visuals based on the visitor data collected this fall will be introduced in spring and early summer for further testing and monitoring.

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Dunckel said another potential benefit to using cell phones is the ability of the Internet and smart phones to extend the learning experience beyond the visitor’s physical trip to a park. In the future, the project could link venue-based activities to a Web site featuring videos, discussion boards, live feeds, picture uploads and other resources. Visitors would be encouraged to share photos and experiences with others on the Internet using popular social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens Executive Director Tony Vecchio added that the project supports the zoo’s existing cell phone-based education program.

The project’s other co-investigators are Paul Boyle, Association of Zoos and Aquariums senior vice president for conservation and education; and Joy Jordan, IFAS associate professor of 4-H youth development.

“Many times, people think of science as an activity you do while wearing a lab coat,” Jordan said. “We hope to highlight the accessibility of scientific study and science-related careers, especially with youth, by presenting nature of science concepts in a fun, informal environment.”

Boyle said 175 million people visit accredited zoos and aquariums every year.

“Call the Wild” grew out of past UF-based projects, including the recently launched Project Butterfly WINGS 4-H curriculum, which showed a need to teach about the nature of science. The team hopes the initial prototypes will prove successful and encourage other zoos and aquariums to adopt the project.

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Source: Betty Dunckel, 352-273-2088, bdunckel@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Kelly Donovan, 352-273-2028, kdonovan@flmnh.ufl.edu
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the three-year, $446,000 project will make the collection at the Florida Museum more readily available to scientists and the public for bird research and identification.

The project will involve more than 2,200 reel-to-reel and cassette tapes of a diverse collection of bird sounds, with a primary focus on New World birds. The digitization process, which begins in January, will result in public access to the recordings via the museum’s Web site. The museum plans to one day have all its recordings available online. The only sounds currently available are about 100 recordings of Florida birds.

“Virtually the entire collection will be available in some form on the museum Web site,” said Thomas Webber, ornithology collections manager at the Florida Museum, on the University of Florida campus. “It includes excellent field recordings dating back to the 1960s from a number of active amateurs and prominent professionals.”

The tapes, currently stored at the Florida Museum, will be shipped in batches to the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at Ohio State University to be digitized.

“Some of the recordings may be irreplaceable,” said Douglas A. Nelson, director of the Borror Lab. “In many cases, the recordings may be unique and may be of species that occupy habitats under increasing threat from human exploitation.”

The Florida Museum has the Western Hemisphere’s second largest collection of bird sound recordings in terms of number of species and the third largest in terms of the actual number of recordings. Cornell University and the Borror Lab have the other top collections.

The Borror Lab is a pioneer at converting analog tape collections to digital media, and UF has worked with researchers there for decades, Webber said.

The grant will pay for equipment and staff time to make and store the digital copies and build upon the museum’s current bird sound database.

Webber estimates the entire collection will fit on a single hard drive. UF will store the analog tapes after they’re digitized. Copies of the digital recordings will be housed at both the Borror Lab and Florida Museum on hard drives and in CD form.

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Studies have shown that analog tape degrades after 40 to 50 years. Transferring the recordings to digital format will ensure their permanence, Nelson said. Florida Museum staff will also have an easier task providing copies of the recordings to scientists, governmental agencies, other museums and bird watchers.

Currently, requests require that someone find and correctly cue the needed reel in the database and then make a digital recording of the specific bird sound, Webber said. The process is time-consuming, and repeated use eventually reduces the tape’s sound quality.

Unused analog recordings also face the risk of deterioration as the oxide coating starts to break down. Magnetized recording patterns also can bleed through to adjacent segments of the tape.

The Florida Museum plans to re-issue some of the 26 bird-sound compilations, a total of more than 1,400 sounds, originally produced by J.W. Hardy, the museum’s curator of ornithology and bioacoustics from 1973 to 1995. Those audio cassette compilations include “Sounds of New World Owls” and “Voices of the Wrens.” Webber said the recordings were extremely popular when cassettes were the standard audio format.

Webber’s priority will be to re-issue recordings of birds that are more readily heard than seen, such as owls and other nocturnal birds, a total of about 200 species. He also plans to issue one of Hardy’s most popular recordings, “Sounds of Florida’s Birds.” The recording forms the basis of the museum’s current Web page of bird sounds, www.flmnh.ufl.edu/birds/sounds.htm, and provides an audio snapshot for featured birds.

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Source: Thomas Webber, 352-273-1972, twebber@flmnh.ufl.edu
Writer: Bill Kanapaux, bkanapaux@flmnh.ufl.edu
Media contact: Paul Ramey, 352-273-2054, pramey@flmnh.ufl.edu