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Alum Success

Amanda is currently working to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Where she is studying the behavior of fossil birds as interpreted through their footprints and other traces. Amanda recently traveled to South Korea to study Early Cretaceous bird tracks and has published two papers on fossil bird tracks, one in the journal Palaios and one in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology. Next, she will study Early Cretaceous fossil birds and bird tracks in China.

"My experience at Lake State, preparing an Undergraduate Thesis and seeing the project through definitely helped prepare me for graduate school. The interaction between the professors and the students at Lake State is far more similar to the interaction between a graduate student and their graduate advisor than the typical undergraduate student / undergraduate advisor rapport; it's much more personalized. It definitely helped prepare me for grad school."

Amanda Falk '07
Biology, minor in Chemistry

School of Biological Sciences

Unique Educational Opportunities

LSSU Biology student on expidition with National Geographic photographer

Harry Dittrich

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. – How much life fits into one cubic foot? To answer that question, National Geographic photographer David Liittschwager takes a green metal frame, a 12-inch cube, to environments around the world — land and water, tropical and temperate. At wildly different locales he sets down the cube and starts watching, counting, and photographing with the help of biologists.

Harry Dittrich
His goal: to represent the creatures that live in or move through that space. His team then sorts through habitat cubes, coaxing out every inhabitant, down to a size of about a millimeter. Accomplishing this takes an average of three weeks at each site.

LSSU student Harry Dittrich has joined a "one-cubic-foot" expedition with National Geographic photographer David Liittschwager and Christopher Meyer, of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History.

The expedition is observing the biodiversity of an intertidal zone and a site on Mount Tamalpais in the San Francisco Bay area during the last two weeks of March and first part of April. Liittschwager is also asking Dittrich to assist in developing tutorial videos to be used to instruct K-12 and college students/teachers on how to perform similar studies in their areas.

The California expedition will be a great resource for Dittrich's senior thesis this summer, when he applies the one-cubic-foot survey approach to a biodiversity study he's conducting of the Duck Lake Fire area in Michigan's upper peninsula.

In the meantime, click here to read Dittrich's daily updates of his California expedition.

Investigat- ing the Use of QPCR: An Early Detection Method for Toxic Cyano- bacterial Bloom

Garrett Aderman

Harmful algal blooms (HABs), including cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (CHABs), are a global phenomenon. In the US, annual economic loss due to HABs was recently estimated at $82 million. Furthermore, the consensus amongst the scientific community is that the frequency and duration of CHABs in freshwater systems will increase as a result of climate change and anthropogenic nutrient enrichment. Due to the ability of some strains of CHAB genera to produce toxic compounds, larger and more sustained CHAB events will become an even greater threat to drinking water. Of all the known cyantoxoins, one of the most ubiquitous is microcystin (MCY). Humans are primarily exposed to cyantoxins through drinking water consumption and accidental ingestion of recreational water. The increasing risk presented by these toxins requires health officials and utilities to improve their ability to track the occurrence and relative toxicity. Current tracking methods do not distinguish between toxic and non-toxic strains. Biochemical techniques for analyzing the toxins are showing considerable potential as they are relatively simple to run and low cost. My goal was to develop a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) method to measure the amount of mcyE gene in a Lake Erie drinking water and compare the levels of the mcyE to toxin produced. This is the first step to determining if the presence of mcyE of the mycrocystin synthestase gene cluster in Microcystits, Planktothrix and Anabaena cells can be used as the quantitative measurement in an early detection warning system for recreational and drinking waters.

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School of Biological Sciences

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LSSU Biology student on expidition with National Geographic photographer