“At the Lab I learned that scientists can not live and work alone if they intend to effect change. To this day, my extended Lab family has given me many opportunities and the much needed, loving encouragement to carry on my work.”

— Theo Colborn
Author, Our Stolen Future

Science in Action: Featured Projects

How Birds May Control Their Immune Systems
Understanding the Impacts of Pollinator Declines
How Pollinators Keep Us Fed
Plants Point to Global Warming
Research Informs Environmental Laws and Land Management
Of Weather and Avalanches
Research Helps Humans

How Birds May Control Their Immune Systems

Dr. Johannes Foufopoulos, a biologist at the University of Michigan, studies disease in white-crowned sparrows. Parasites and disease are common, but they can be difficult to see and understand without looking closely, as Johannes does. Vertebrates, including humans, evolved sophisticated immune systems to minimize problems with disease. Until recently, scientists believed that immune systems remain constantly “on.” However, research now indicates that running the immune system takes energy and that animals can tune their immune systems up or down, depending upon how much protection they need. A white-crowned sparrow, for example, must constantly decide how much energy it needs to direct toward raising young and making new feathers versus how much it needs to protect itself from diseases. The response depends not only on whether the bird is raising young, but whether diseases are present that it might contract. Johannes’s research seeks to understand how birds’ ability to adjust their immune systems in response to disease and available food supplies affects their ability to survive and raise young. Johannes is helping document the movement of diseases through bird populations, as well as providing insights into human health and the management of endangered species.

Understanding the Impacts of Pollinator Declines

Recently, national concern has focused on the loss of the birds and insects that visit plants—pollinators. As part of the long-term studies on pollination at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, scientists have turned their attention to understanding how pollinators and the plants they visit respond to disturbances in the environment, such as droughts and climate change. Recent work by Dr. Nick Waser, a scientist at the University of Arizona, indicates that many plant species are visited by many different species of pollinators. This suggests that loss of any particular bird or insect pollinator should not totally disrupt native wildflowers or agricultural systems.

Dr. Graham Pyke, a research scientist at the Australian Museum, is back at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory after more than 20 years. In 1974 Graham surveyed the mountains around Gothic and measured the many different types of pollinators visiting the area’s plants. In 2007, with the assistance of Dr. David Inouye, of the University of Maryland, and Dr. James Thomson, of the University of Toronto, Graham is re-establishing the same transects, in order to determine how insect and bird species have changed in the last 30 years.

Invasive plants can have very significant negative impacts on native ecosystems. Dr. Rebecca Irwin, of Dartmouth College, is exploring how an invasive plant, Butter and Eggs, disrupts the ability of native plants to attract pollinators.

How Pollinators Keep Us Fed

Many cultures eat bugs—Africans eat termites, Ute Indians ate grasshoppers. Most of us don’t want to eat insects. Still, insects feed us.

When we smear honey on our toast in the morning, we’re eating nectar licked from the flowers by European honeybees.

This is but the tiny favor honeybees do for humanity. The huge favor is the pollination of flowers. Unwittingly, bees, hummingbirds, birds, moths, and butterflies enable plants to reproduce. They and other animals spread pollen from male to female plants. Without pollinators we can kiss much of what we eat—fruits, vegetables, nuts, and lots more— goodbye.

Scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory are learning more about how pollinators keep ecosystems in balance. Over the last decade they have joined other pollination ecologists in applying the theory of “networks” to the study of birds and bees. Drawing on ideas from mathematics, physics, and the social sciences, network theory turns out to be an excellent tool for describing the interactions between flowers and pollinators. Scientists once believed that many plants required specific pollinators. Network analysis reveals instead that specialist plants usually attract insects that pollinate many species of flowers. These findings hold implications for understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape relationships between plants and pollinators—and conversely, for understanding how these relationships can be disrupted.

Pollination scientists at the Lab also have gathered data over decades on the high-altitude meadows around Gothic. They have detected changes that are consistent with a warming climate, such as earlier seasonal timing of flowering and of pollinator flight activity. They have become convinced that climate change, invasive plants, habitat fragmentation, and other man-made processes are threatening the natural balance of plants and pollinators.

The findings of these scientists contributed to a 2007 report by the National Academy of Sciences pointing to serious declines in pollination. At the same time, though, there is good news: studies at the Lab offer an understanding of pollination that will help conserve an ecological interaction upon which we all depend.

Plants Point to Global Warming

“When Dr. David Inouye first began looking at flowering plants in the high meadows around the lab more than 30 years ago, he had no idea that his findings would become what scientists worldwide agree is an important part of understanding global warming. Dr. Inouye, who is director of University of Maryland’s graduate program in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology, has visited research plots every other day during the growing season for the last three decades in order to track when different species of plants flower and how the abundance of flowering changes. Dr. Inouye has found that climate change has disrupted how wildflowers are adapted to their environment; earlier flowering has meant that many flowers are being destroyed by frost and some plant species may be diverging from their pollinators in their timing of seasonal activity.

While Dr. Inouye’s work is one of the longest and most complete studies on plant flowering, there are now networks across the world devoted to tracking when plants flower. This work is critical to understanding how our world is changing and will help farmers understand what climate change means to their ability to produce food.

Data collected at the Lab is filling important gaps in what is known about now widely recognized phenomena. Basic research conducted at the RMBL has proven vital to our understanding of global warming, acid rain, and global amphibian declines, among other environmental changes, and their implications for human health and survival.”

Research Informs Environmental Laws and Land Management

Forty years ago, Dr. Scottie Willey and her husband Bob, both scientists at the University of Illinois, stood down a bulldozer with butterfly nets to protect high-altitude ponds in a preserve called the Mexican Cut. Scientists had long studied these ponds and their efforts convinced The Nature Conservancy to protect them, ensuring scientists would have access to this stunningly beautiful landscape for future study.

Decades of research at the Mexican Cut led to groundbreaking laws to protect water for wildlife and recreation—over the strenuous objections of the state’s entrenched water interests.

Research on salamanders at the Mexican Cut over 30 years is helping us to understand how to interpret declines in amphibian populations. One result of this work was the detection of acid rain linked to power plants hundreds of miles upwind. These are among findings that led to successful efforts to tighten clean air standards throughout the West.

Current research at the Mexican Cut also is shedding light on whether plants with high metal tolerances can be used to clean up the remains of abandoned mines.

Of Weather and Avalanches

Watching the world closely over time has provided valuable learning at the Lab. In 1972 a young college student from Trenton, New Jersey, billy barr, came to Gothic to do an undergraduate research project and spend his first summer in the Rocky Mountains. billy quickly decided it was where he wanted to be.

After finishing college at Rutgers, billy moved into one of Gothic’s abandoned mining shacks built in the 1880s—without electricity or running water. He thrived, despite the fact that the area gets almost 40 feet of snow a year. He eventually built a home.

It turns out that billy is a systematic note taker (what else do you do when you’re snowed in with no electricity?) Over the last 30 years billy has created the world’s most complete record of natural avalanches. Although never intended that his notes would be used, his data are helping to understand and predict avalanches.

billy also has tracked when birds and animals first appear each spring. billy’s data now are being used by Lab’s scientists to document and understand climate change.

Research Helps Humans

Dr. Theo Colborn’s experience as a pharmacist in the mining belt of Colorado piqued her interest in the relationship between chemicals and health. After raising her family, she decided to go back to school.

As part of starting a new career, she took summer classes at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory where she worked with scientists. One of them, Dr. Stan Dodson, from the University of Wisconsin, became her PhD advisor. From the Lab, Theo conducted the fieldwork for her dissertation, which focused on the use of stream insects to detect mining pollution in streams.

While Theo’s research focused on a very narrow issue, it led her to the insight that humans are being exposed to a wide range of chemicals, many of which negatively effect health.

Her work helped reveal that pregnant women exposed to even small amounts of certain chemicals risk dramatic, negative impacts to their fetuses. She co-authored Our Stolen Future, and through her work at the World Wildlife Fund she focused international attention on the pervasiveness of chemicals in the environment.