Undertstanding the Diversity of Ants Around Us

Dr. Amy Arnett Wins Prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award

By Mark Tardif, Associate Director of College Communications, Unity College

For just the second time in the 43 year history of Unity College a faculty member has been awarded a coveted Fulbright Scholar Award, commonly called a Fulbright Fellowship, an honor bestowed on some of the most accomplished faculty and researchers in the world. Recently, Associate Professor of Biology Dr. Amy Arnett, Ph.D., received the news from the Fulbright Selection Committee.

As a Fulbright Scholar Award recipient, Dr. Arnett is among faculty and professionals from the United States chosen to participate in the Fulbright Scholar Program. The program’s purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.

Dr. Amy Arnett chats during opening convocation with Associate Professor Tom Mullin

From February to June of 2009, Arnett will be teaching and conducting research at the University of Maribor in Slovenia. This eastern European university is a good match for Arnett because a colleague in Maribor and some of his graduate students study an insect called an ant lion. During her graduate studies at the University of Vermont, Arnett studied ant lion evolution and behavior. The Fulbright Fellowship will allow Arnett to continue her research concerning ant lions, plus teach as a member of the Biology Department at the University of Maribor.

The Fulbright announcement drew immediate praise from President Mitchell Thomashow, Senior Vice President Amy Knisley, the faculty and entire college community.

“Amy has provided leadership among the faculty in a variety of ways since her arrival in 1999,” said Knisley. “While I am delighted, I can honestly say that I am not surprised that she has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. Hard on the heels of Dr. Jim Chacko’s Fulbright award in the Spring of 2006, this should remind all Unity students, alumns and employees of what we’re capable of at this little college in Maine.”

The ant lion is often called a doodle-bug in the southern United States, says Arnett. “The ant lion larvae dig a pit in the soil and they sit and wait at the bottom of the pit,” explained Arnett. “Ants slide down the slope and are eaten by the ant lion. The ant lion larvae are sit-and-wait predators.”

In 1997, Arnett gathered latitudinal ant biodiversity data the results of which were announced in the journal Science. During the summer of that year while working towards her Ph.D, Arnett traveled from northern Florida to northern New York collecting ants in different habitats.

“We showed that the introduced fire ant in the south was having a negative impact on native ant biodiversity, it was published in the journal Ecology Letters, and as a note in Science,” Arnett said.

Dr. Arnett conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, on the impacts of a biological control insect (insects deliberately introduced to control weeds) on native prairie plants. However, when she came to Unity College she wanted to find a local study system, so she started to work on purple loosestrife, a highly invasive plant of European origin. There have been several biological control insects introduced to control the spread of purple loosestrife and Arnett was interested in the evolution of these introduced insects and changes in community structure based on these introductions. She worked with several Unity College students to address these questions, commuting frequently to large, established purple loosestrife populations at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge and Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The down-side to this research was that it required frequent travel to southern Maine, which is a long commute.

Her switch to ants was an easy one. “Basically (the switch) was a combination of not wanting to drive to southern Maine, and wanting to weave my research into my courses more,” noted Arnett. “I was looking for a system closer to home and enjoyed the ant work I did for my Ph.D. So in the summers of 2006 and 2007, I had Unity College students help me collect ants on the woodlot and meadow adjacent to campus. They were collected in pitfall traps (vial in the ground, soapy water, ants will fall in and die, then are collected and preserved in alcohol).”

The bottleneck is finding the time to identify the ants collected in hundreds of vials. It takes a lot of time to pursue this painstaking research.

What does this research accomplish? It points to the scope of biodiversity in a variety of environments, responses of species to environmental changes, and offers a baseline from which to study the effects of climate change.

“I am interested in where species are found relative to certain environmental characteristics like vegetation, soil characteristics and leaf litter depth,” Arnett explained. She pursued a sabbatical during spring 2008 in which she had time to sort through vials, pin the ants, and get the identification down to species, and develop more projects for ant biodiversity.

Unity College students were involved with Arnett’s sabbatical ant biodiversity research. She also worked with Nicholas Gotelli, a Professor of Biology at the University of Vermont, and Stefan Cover, the Assistant Curator at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

“They’re excited about my collection because Maine has not been extensively sampled,” Arnett said. “I have already documented 14 species that are new to Waldo County, two of which have never been documented in Maine, and they were found in our wood lot.” She hopes to do more hand collection this summer, trying to find nests and doing more Global Positioning System work, documenting the proximity of ant nests in relation to one another.

The Islands off the coast of Maine have also attracted Arnett’s attention. She is involved in an ongoing survey of ants on eight islands off the coast of Maine for National Audubon and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The ants were collected during the summer of 2007. Arnett gave both organizations instructions on pitfall trapping of ants and the staff conducted the ant survey, giving her the ants for identification and analysis.

It is time consuming, detailed, painstaking work, but Arnett wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“I am interested in what species got out to the islands, are they representative of ant diversity on the mainland, and they evolve over time in isolation,” said Arnett.

The success of her research both before and since becoming a member of the Unity College community pointed to her likely ascension to the Fulbright ranks. Arnett had been optimistic about her Fulbright application, but no applicant ever counts on being selected. The odds seemed greater for Arnett, a faculty member dedicated to the hands-on, student-centered curriculum of small Unity College. The additional wrinkle is that it is well-established that Fulbright Fellowships in the sciences are overwhelmingly awarded to professors at large universities.

The advantage for Fulbright Fellowship applicants from large institutions particularly in the sciences is clear, with such applicants having fewer classes to teach and more time to pursue scholarship. Arnett’s selection is testament to her professional stature among the very best of her colleagues and the effectiveness of her research. It also reflects very well on academics overall at Unity College, where students have daily contact with award-winning faculty such as Arnett.

Since its inaugural in the late 1940s, the Fulbright Program has been an integral part of U.S. foreign relations. Indeed, face-to-face exchanges have proven to be the single most effective means of engaging foreign publics while broadening dialogue between U.S. citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad. In doing so, the Fulbright Program creates a context to provide a better understanding of U.S. views and values, promotes more effective binational cooperation and nurtures open-minded, thoughtful leaders, both in the U.S. and abroad, who can work together to address common concerns.

Arnett has pursued Post-Doctoral Research at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, holds a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Vermont, and a B.S. in Biology from the University of Michigan. Currently she lists her comprehensive research areas of interest as community and population ecology, evolutionary ecology, insect ecology, life-history theory, patterns of biodiversity, and plant-animal interactions.

While a self-effacing individual, Arnett is pleased to bring a Fulbright to Unity College. “It’s exceptional for a small college to have two Fulbright scholars,” Arnett noted. “Parents will look at this school and realize that their students will have the opportunity to take classes taught by Fulbright scholars. My classes are small and in first year biology labs I have information to pass on to my students that I have gathered directly from scholars across the world. That is exciting and has an important positive impact in the classroom.”

The Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Maribor in Slovenia will be a family affair for Arnett. She will be joined by her husband Scott Hall, a biologist for the National Audubon Seabird Restoration Project, Caleb, 6, and Phoebe, 3.

Arnett’s profile is on the web at http://www.unity.edu/AboutUnity/MeetOurFaculty/AArnett/AArnett.aspx. She plans to set up a blog while in residence that will allow Unity College students to have access to students and faculty at the University of Maribor.

More information on the Fulbright program is available online at http://fulbright.state.gov/.