Valerie Banschbach, Associate Professor of Biology received FDC funding two grants to support and expand her research on “Ants as Bioindicators”.  The first grant covered Professor Banschbach’s travel, lodging and research fees during a 2006 trip to Costa Rica to study the effects of habitat fragmentation upon ant species diversity and composition in a cloud forest.  The second FDC grant funded two other trips in 2006 to further analyze the ants collected in Costa Rica.  She traveled to Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology to work with the co-curator of the insect collection to complete the identification of ants and to the Ohio State University to learn to assay DNA for the determination of genetic relatedness among ants.  This latter work will allow her to follow-up on an observation made during her research in Costa Rica, the observation that one ant species shows significant variation in social structure that appears be related to habitat fragmentation.   

Professor Banschbach now has enough data to prepare a manuscript for publication in a peer reviewed journal.  And, in December she will present the research at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America, including three SMC students (now alumni) as co-authors.  In addition, this on-going research has enhanced her teaching of Biology 250: Tropical Ecology, a course she co-teaches with Peter Hope.