Notre Dame hosts research program at Bison Range
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MOIESE - Marliz Vega Ross of Puerto Rico has spent her summer carefully examining and logging subtle differences on blades of foliage on the National Bison Range. Tiny holes meant the vegetation was snacked on by insects. Long, cut-like marks meant mammals like bison ate it.
At a final Saturday meeting, Vega Ross presented her findings about which animals preferred native and invasive species to eight of her classmates enrolled in the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center -West campus in Moiese.
The meeting brought the eighth UNDERC West program to a conclusion. The program offers paid wildlife research opportunities to eight students from across the United States and Puerto Rico. It was formed in 2006 after Gary Belovsky was named director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center.
Belovsky has spent the last 35 summers conducting one of the longest rangeland studies in the nation at the National Bison Range, where he focused on grasshoppers.
He and research technicians, dubbed “the grasshopper crew,” catch and study thousands of the insects each summer from the range. They also work closely with UNDERC students’ research project. Students are pre-selected from a group of 28 that completed the UNDERC East program in the upper peninsula of Michigan the previous year.
“I think after a summer here in Montana, given the rougher conditions, they have a much better idea of what (outdoor) fieldwork might be like because up in the peninsula of Michigan the university’s facilities are so phenomenal, top notch. They are almost like a resort,” Belovsky said.
Nora Nickels, a 2013 Notre Dame graduate of biology and anthropology, said the program opened her eyes to what fieldwork was like.
“In a lab you have more control over the animal,” she said. “In the field you don’t have that control. With the mice you could hold them by the tail and let them lay down — not let them dangle, though, or they get mad — and drag them in circles just long enough to let them get a little dazed so you could grab them.”
This summer Nickels trapped mice and studied whether they did or did not eat candy and/or shy away from predator urine. She set traps at 6 p.m. and would trap the mice at night. She caught 130 different mice during the summer, and was sure to paint their toenails so she would know if they were captured twice.
UNDERC West program students live in a small house on a ranch in Moiese. More of their time is spent in the field, instead of in a formal classroom, Belovsky said. Coursework centers on the ecology of the area, as well as cultural aspects of the Salish and Kootenai tribe.
Of the program’s 64 graduates, many were recruited through ties to tribal governments.
“Three of our former Native American students are now heads of their tribal resource programs,” Belovsky said. “At least five of our non-Native American students have also gone to work on reservations.”
Vega Ross said she plans to take her summer experience with invasive species back to Puerto Rico, where she will be a senior at Inter American University and volunteers in a lab that studies the effects of non-native boa constrictors on native snakes. She eventually wants to go to graduate school and work in resource management in the United States.
Jenny Lesko liked the program so much she’s returning next week to work on the grasshopper crew, who will continue their studies through the end of summer. The 2013 graduate of Notre Dame’s environmental science program said she isn’t exactly sure what the future holds for her, but she thinks her experience studying the differences in insect populations on forest, bison range and farmland plots will be beneficial.
“I think I want to do something related to this for sure,” Lesko said. “I want to go into forest ecology. I’ll probably end up going to grad school at some point.”
Nick Anderson, who worked on the grasshopper crew, has already landed a research job in Hawaii from the project. He’s upgrading to a more difficult animal to chase — birds.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes receives copies of the UNDERC West students final papers each year.
