Congratulations to Quinn, who was awarded High Honors for her poster "Short-term enrichment interacts with experience to influence neophobia in Trinidadian guppies". The Hoke lab conducted a brief interview with her about her project, which you can read below. Congratulations, Quinn! What was your project about? What do you think it means? Quinn: This project is important for many reasons. The first being that most enrichment research is done in large mammals and not much research is done for fish, reptiles or invertebrates. The second being that Trinidadian guppies are a great model organism for research in many different areas because their morphology and behavior are very susceptible to change. If a scientist is interested in the stream ecology and behavior in wild populations, a laboratory setting could have severe effects on behavior and morphology and the data collected wouldn't be accurate for the wild populations, but adding enrichment in the lab could aid in potentially getting a more accurate representation of a wild population. How long did you work on this project? Quinn: I worked on the data collection aspect for about 3 weeks. There was a two week acclimation period and then doing assays for about a week. Though overall I spent around 2 months prepping for the project, gathering data and then analyzing the data (the two months is spread out throughout a semester, but there was a break between gathering data and analyzing while I attended Laura Stein's Rstudio workshop to learn how to analyze). Do you plan to do anything further with this project? What are your plans after you graduate in May? Quinn: Currently, I have an extension project going on looking at how environmental enrichment affects guppies through the development and see any sex differences in behavior. We already have significant differences in juvenile size between the enriched and unenriched environments which is really exciting to see! Once I graduate I am heading out to Dallas for a behavioral research internship at Dallas Zoo where I will most likely be working on okapis (my favorite animal)!
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