From late May to late June this past summer, I spent six weeks working with Dr. Brad Carlson and Justin Lewis ’26 on several different projects, all of which were related to Dr. Carlson’s ongoing research of the Eastern box turtle. We spent almost half of our internship working in Allee Woods, a plot of land that Wabash owns west of Turkey Run State Park. While in the woods, we went searching for said turtles to add to Dr. Carlson’s decade-long catalog of turtles in the area in hopes of constructing a population estimate. We also used our time outside to collect snails for our lab experiment. Why snails you may ask? The experiment that Dr. Carlson, Justin, and I designed was to test whether or not the smell of a natural predator of snails (box turtles) alters the behavior of different species of snails. “There was an obvious gap in the literature,” said Dr. Carlson. “Snails are very common and likely to play important roles in forests, and box turtles seem to heavily favor snails in their diet. This predator-prey relationship is imperiled by declines in box turtles, and yet we know nothing about it, nor do we really know much of anything about how land-dwelling snails respond to predators at all.” To try and represent that predator-prey relationship in data, we collected three different species of snails in the woods and brought them back to the lab to test.
We ran two tests—a crawling and a climbing assay with different combinations of scents over a 6-day period. We are still in the process of analyzing our data and writing a paper to present at a conference in Georgia in late September. One of the main reasons that I chose to do a STEM internship at Wabash this summer was to see if working in a lab setting is something I am interested in. I am not on the pre-med track, and a life in the lab has never been something I aspire to. But, I had never done lab work outside of classes, so I wanted that experience before I could decide if the lab was a viable career path after Wabash. I’m not sure if it is or not yet, but this experience was definitely something that I enjoyed putting my time towards and taught me valuable lab skills that will translate to other classes in my last two years at Wabash. I’d like to thank Dr. Carlson and my lab partner Justin for all of their hard work this summer. This internship felt much more like a collaboration than an internship, and that feeling allowed us to gather great data and have an excellent time!
