Pitt operates a rural research treasure

In rural Crawford County, 100 miles north of Pittsburgh, a gray barn sits amid farmland and forest.

It would blend perfectly into the quiet countryside -- if it weren't for the hundreds of plastic wading pools surrounding it in seemingly haphazard rows and groupings.

"Welcome to the Farm," says Rick Relyea, director of the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology, Linesville, as he hops from a white university-issued van and pulls the cover off of one of the wading pools.

Inside, dozens of gray tree frog tadpoles squirm in the shallow water, waiting their turn to help make science-history and change public policy through a slew of experiments inside the barn-like laboratory.

This summer marks the 60th year of the University of Pittsburgh field station and its experiments that test the effects of pesticides, invasive species, habitat changes and emerging diseases.

"It's a real treasure," says Graham Hatfull, chair of Pitt's Department of Biological Sciences. "It is a rare asset for a department in a university to have a field station of such caliber."

Summer camp-like setting

Spread out on chunks of property that ring Pymatuning Lake, this Pitt outpost is not considered a satellite campus.

"It's geographically separated, but it is really a part of the Biological Sciences Department on the main campus," Relyea says. "The reason we're here is because the things we do really can't be done in Oakland. We need land, we need space, we need wild plants and animals to work with."

Laboratory-grade equipment, high-powered microscopes and scientific software let scientists watch for minute mutations in amphibians that can indicate dramatic environmental changes at the Farm -- so named because it was built on 134 acres of old farmland.

Inside the cabins at the Sanctuary Lake Site -- the original location of the expanded lab -- are administrative offices, lecture halls, computer rooms and a scientific supply room stocked with, among other things, 43 pairs of waders ranging from size 4 women's to 14 men's.

The housing site is reminiscent of a summer camp, complete with a large dinner bell, pit for evening campfires, and canoes to paddle around the lily pad-choked lake.

The natural laboratory was first conceived in 1926 at Presque Isle on the shores of Lake Erie. But the creation of Presque Isle State Park crowded out the modest field station.

In 1949, Pitt leased a 13-acre wooded peninsula from the state and established the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology.

By the mid-1990s, Pitt reached a crossroads with the field station. The buildings had been falling into disrepair for years and Pitt needed to invest in upgrading Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology, or shut it down.

"There aren't too many environmental areas in the country that are similar to what Pymatuning offers, and clearly none within Allegheny County," says Dick Howe, associate dean for administration and planning in Pitt's College of Arts and Sciences.

"To have a comprehensive department of biological sciences, we needed to have a strong subdiscipline of ecology and evolution," Howe says. "Thus the decision was made that we needed Pymatuning Laboratory to continue."

Over the past decade, research has picked up as the university increased investment in the field station, not only building the barn/laboratory, but updating living and administrative quarters to make them more attractive to students and scientists at Pitt and nationwide.

Life on The Farm

At the Farm, the bulk of the research revolves around amphibians and man-made chemicals.

"We work with species often from Western Pennsylvania, but the implications for things like toxicity of pesticides really has reached all around the world," Relyea says.

Several years ago, he and his team made headlines with the discovery that the common weed-killer Roundup, made by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co., was also killing tadpoles.

In concentrations consistent with run-off into ponds, Roundup wiped out 40 percent of the tadpoles in wading pools designed to mimic the seasonal ponds where frogs lay eggs.

"The work that we've done with Roundup ... has had implications to the drug war in Columbia and South America. This is a very lethal herbicide and we're spraying Roundup to kill coca and poppy plantations," Relyea says. "The over-spraying down there from airplanes has stopped because of the work we've done in Western Pennsylvania."

Relyea and his dozen-or-so graduate, post-doctoral and undergraduate students are now looking to answer the broader question of why amphibian species are on a sharp global decline.

AmphibiaWeb, a database created to examine the decline of amphibians and based out of the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than 40 percent of amphibian species worldwide have populations that are declining.

"Every pesticide in the United States -- virtually every one -- does not have to be tested on amphibians," Relyea says. Federal testing on fish is extrapolated to amphibians, even though they are different classes of animals.

But pesticides alone are probably not the sole culprit. Predators, a fungus that attacks immune systems and changes in forest composition likely all combine until the stress is more than amphibians can bear.

To test this hypothesis, the Farm scientists examine various combinations.

Graduate student Maya Groner is preparing to send "froglets" -- the stage between tadpole and frog -- to Oregon for inoculation with a fungus that was discovered in 1998. The fungus has been associated with global frog declines.

In separate aquariums, Groner raises healthy tadpoles and tadpoles frightened by dragonfly larvae that eat their brethren. The hypothesis is that frightened tadpoles have weaker immune systems and are more likely to die when infected with the fungus.

"The froglets are more susceptible to infection because when a frog goes through metamorphosis their body changes so much," says Groner, 27. "That turns out to be when you see a lot of mortality as a result of disease."

Outside, Jessica Hua tends to wading pools with different levels of endosulfan, an insecticide used to control cabbage worms, potato beetles and aphids.

"Look at this tank," Hua says, pulling the cover off of a wading pool thick with algae and comparing it to a much cleaner pool where tadpoles flit about. Tadpoles eat algae, so lots of algae means no tadpoles.

"They have the same animals, the same everything, all I did was put in a few drops of insecticide," she says. "Endosulfan, all by itself, killed about 83 percent of leopard frogs at an incredibly low dose."

It is as lethal as Roundup at 1/1,000th the concentration, Relyea says. How deadly it could be in combination with the fungus is a future experiment.

Hua, 22, came back to the laboratory after a summer stint at the field station as an undergraduate from the University of Texas. She's now a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.

"During the school year, we're down in Pittsburgh in classes, but during the summer that's the season when the frogs breed and all the animals are out," she says. "It works out perfectly because we do all our experiments during the summer and then bring all our stuff back and analyze it on campus during the school year."

Cooperative education

Kris Chapman will bring his research back to class too -- but not at the University of Pittsburgh.

Chapman, a biology teacher at Greenville High School in Mercer County, is enrolled in the "Research Experience for Teachers" program. The goal is to teach the teacher so the lesson reaches hundreds of students.

"Being a teacher, you get away from the research a bit," Chapman says. "So being able to do real science on the cutting-edge and being able to take that back to the classroom is a great opportunity for me."

Education for the sake of education, not necessarily to make scientific discoveries, is one of the major missions of the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology.

Through partnerships with Clarion, Edinboro, Indiana and Slippery Rock universities, undergraduates can come to the field station and complete a semester-long course in a matter of weeks.

"The field station is able to train more people this way," Relyea says. "And it keeps us networked with the regional universities -- this isn't just the University of Pittsburgh field station. Certainly we own it, but it has an impact on many other universities."

Among those are Duke University and the University of Miami. Scientists from both schools were at the field station this spring for continuing research on a well-documented population of song sparrows.

With a Tupperware container of mealworms, Bill Searcy, professor of ornithology at Miami, treks through a half mile of grassy field edged by forest and wetlands to a small wooden platform with several circular indents drilled into it. Into a few of those indents he places the worms and then covers them with yellow lids. The empty ones get blue lids.

"We're trying to measure learning ability in song sparrows and we're relating that to their song," he says. "So we get them to learn this foraging task where they remove little plastic lids to find food. The ones that pick up the color association faster are the smarter ones."

Birds that are better at the color association seem to have a wider song repertoire, a learned trait. Since bird song plays a role in mating, the findings could have implications for survival.

A natural selection

Because habitat is crucial for the survival of so many species -- from birds to bugs -- studying where they live is yet another base the field station covers.

In the same wading pools used as mock-frog ponds, Aaron Stoler drops leaves from Western Pennsylvania trees.

"Trees lose leaves because it is a burden in the winter," says Stoler, a graduate student. "As an undergraduate I studied what leaves did when they fell into streams. Now I'm wondering, well, what happens when they fall into ponds."

As forests are logged or invasive insects invade, their composition changes. Stoler found that when black willow leaves dominate a pond, fewer tadpoles thrive than in a pond with rapidly decaying tulip poplar leaves.

"The forest service manages for certain kinds of trees, but they're not looking at what it does to the wetlands in the forest," Relyea says. "I think this work is going to be really getting a lot of attention -- it's got great ecology, great applications to forest management."

For a decade, Pitt biologist Walt Carson has had an ongoing experiment to look at the effect of the invasive purple loosestrife, a tall flowering plant native to Europe and Asia, in simulated marshes.

He's putting the invasive loosestrife up against the native cattail -- and then throwing a loosestrife-killing bug into the mix.

"If you have loosestrife and cattail, do they compete?" Relyea says. "And does that competition between the two change when you put the bug on?"

Results are pending, though the loosestrife seems to be gaining ground on the cattail.

The combination of invasive plants, pesticides, predators and more make seemingly simple pond life incredibly complex -- and inviting to even nonscientific types.

"It's the kind of retirement job that everybody dreams of," says Walt Mullen, a retired English teacher-turned-site manager. "It is a great place to live, great people to work with and when you get a little stressed, you walk out on the lawn and watch the eagles fish and it heals your soul.

"I would have to pay for all the knowledge I've learned, and now I just walk out and ask a scientist: 'Hey, can you tell me why...' "