Chosen as a ‘cultural ambassador’

BY SCOTT MONROE
Staff Writer

09/22/2008

UNITY -- It's a sunny September afternoon as Amy Arnett pulls on rubber boots and grabs a net attached to a pole. She steps into the Sandy Stream at Unity College, reaches into the water and picks up a rock, explaining to her seven students where they might find insects and what kinds.

Demonstrating the proper technique, Arnett plunges the net into the stones and mud beneath the water and kicks into it. Her students are to find several examples of the various insect orders and store them in vials.

"When you see something cool, show everybody else too, so we can learn from it," Arnett says to the students.

An hour later, the students are returning one by one from the stream with vials full of insects they found under rocks and in the mud.

"Oh, wow. Cool," Arnett says as she examines a student's vial and ticks off a half-dozen insect names. "They're weirdly colored."

Staff Photo by David Leaming

Arnett, 39, of Belfast, loves being outdoors and interacting with students in the field. As a professor at Unity, her love of nature and her interest in ecology has brought her many places.

Now, her research will bring a new -- and rare -- challenge.

Unity College officials recently announced that Arnett was a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award.

It's only the second time in 43 years that a Unity faculty member has received the award, the college said. The Fulbright program aims to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.

From February to June 2009, Arnett will teach and conduct research at the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 to promote mutual understanding between U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries.

Colby College spokeswoman Ruth Jacobs said four Colby College recent graduates also received Fulbright grants to spend this year abroad: Hannah Coleman, class of '08, is teaching in Colombia; William Fong ('08) is teaching in Taiwan, Gretchen Markiewicz ('08) is teaching in Bavaria and Danielle Preiss ('07) has a research grant in Nepal. Additionally, Chris Hoffman ('07), Chris Shelley ('08) and Melanie Ungar ('08) are all teaching in Austria in a separate program administered by the organization that runs the Fulbrights.

The eastern European university is a good match for Arnett, Unity College officials said, because a colleague in Maribor and some of his graduate students study an insect called an antlion.

Under the Fulbright Fellowship, Arnett will continue her research concerning antlions, plus teach as a member of the biology department at the University of Maribor. Arnett says she's known since June that she had been selected for the Fulbright award and she flew to Washington, D.C., to be honored.

While in Slovenia, Arnett will continue her study of a larva insect known as the antlion. It's a predatory insect that burrows itself into a little dip in the dirt, carefully stacking and spitting the dirt back out in such a way that the thinnest and finest layer is spread on the outer edges.

The result, Arnett said, is a deadly trap: ants crawl into the hole and the ant lion's mandibles reach up through the dirt and pull its prey in for the kill. The ant is dragged beneath the quicksand-like surface to its demise.

"It's a spectacular trap," she said. "They're predators of ants. Ants slide down, are grabbed and they suck the juices out and throw the carcass away."

The antlions live two to three years in the larva stage; that's the majority of their life span. When they develop into adults, the antlions grow wings. The adult version of the insect don't live very long and they're hard to find, Arnett said.

"I don't see them that often," Arnett said. "They won't stay alive in the lab."

Arnett's study of the insects has stretched from Florida to New York with more than 60 population samples. What she found was that the insects were much larger in the north than in the south (although the difference to humans is mere millimeters).

Arnett said those findings seem to reinforce Bergmann's rule, a principle that says the body size of warm-blooded animal species should vary with the average environmental temperature, and therefore larger species are found in colder climates. The rule usually doesn't apply to insects, she said, but it makes sense that the insects would need to be larger to survive starvation during the winter months.

Gaining confidence

Arnett's love of insects goes all the way back to childhood, when she was 4 or 5 years old and had her own insect collection. She grew up on a farm in Michigan.

She was all set to become a doctor or a veterinarian when, at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, she took a class on animal behavior. She was fascinated by the possibilities.

Arnett wrote a grant to study the endangered cockatoo in Australia. She stayed there for nine months, and while there she worked with a male colleague who wasn't very organized. It led to a revelation: "If he could get a Ph.D from Michigan, I could," she said. "It gave me some confidence, that you just need to stay on task."

She attended graduate school at the University of Vermont. During her graduate studies at the University of Vermont, Arnett studied antlion evolution and behavior. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, on the impacts of a biological control insect on native prairie plants. Those insects are intentionally introduced into an area to control weeds.

She started at Unity College in 1999; it was her first formal teaching job.

"It takes a lot of work but I think I work hard to figure out how the students work best, how to get them engaged," she said. "If people are open to that, I can be a good teacher."

Arnett returned to ants in 2006 when she enlisted Unity College students to help collect ants around the campus. Students were also involved in her sabbatical research on ant biodiversity.

Her teaching style makes a big impression on students. James Beaudry, a 22-year-old, fourth-year fisheries and agriculture major at Unity, says he enjoys Arnett's classes because she makes the learning interesting and personable.

"It's more hands-on than some of the other classes," Beaudry said. "We do quite a bit of this field stuff."

Cultural exchange

Arnett said she's looking forward to teaching and conducting research at to the University of Maribor. Also, she's corresponded with a professor at the university for the last decade and they will now get to meet in person.

She's interested in addressing many questions during her Fulbright Fellowship, including how biodiversity changes with temperature and how human disturbance of habitats affects biodiversity.

But she's also prepared to expect the unexpected.

"I don't know exactly what I'm going do in Slovenia; it's going to be cold there, too," she said.

During her six months abroad, she'll be joined by her husband Scott Hall, a biologist for the National Audubon Seabird Restoration Project, 6-year-old Caleb and 3-year-old Phoebe.

Arnett she's also interested in how European students, accustomed to a classroom that is "very lecture-based," will react to her teaching style. She'll be comparing antlions between the U.S. and Europe, and address questions such as whether their pit-building technique is any different.

She hopes to start a blog during her stay and establish a connection between the ecology students there and the ones at Unity.

"That will be really interesting," Arnett said. "Part of the Fulbright is being a cultural ambassador."