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- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
Description
Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies have experienced substantial losses due to colony collapse disorder (CCD) since the first officially reported cases in 2006. Many factors have been implicated in CCD, including pests, pathogens, malnutrition, and pesticide use, but no correlation has been found between a single factor and the occurrence of CCD. Fungicides have received less research attention compared to insecticides, despite the fact that fungicide application coincides with bloom and the presence of bees. Pristine fungicide is widely used in agriculture and is commonly found as a residue in hives. Several studies have concluded that Pristine can be used without harming bees, but reports of brood loss following Pristine application continue to surface across the country. The primary objectives of this study were to determine whether Pristine causes an aversive gustatory response in bees and whether consumption of an acute dose affects responsiveness to sucrose. An awareness of how foragers interact with contaminated food is useful to understand the likelihood that Pristine is ingested and how that may affect bees' ability to evaluate floral resources. Our results indicated that Pristine has no significant effect on gustatory response or sucrose responsiveness. There was no significant difference between bee responses to Pristine contaminated sucrose and sucrose alone, and no significant effect of Pristine on sucrose responsiveness. These results indicate that honey bees do not have a gustatory aversion to Pristine. A lack of aversion means that honey bees will continue collecting contaminated resources and dispersing them throughout the colony where it can affect brood and clean food stores.
ContributorsMcHugh, Cora Elizabeth (Co-author) / Jernigan, Christopher (Co-author, Committee member) / Burden, Christina (Co-author) / DeGrandi-Hoffman, Gloria (Co-author) / Smith, Brian (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a globally prevalent infection which is a main contributor to the global burden of liver disease. Due to its ability to establish a chronic infection, and the lack of usefulness of traditional neutralizing antibody vaccine design in producing a protective immune response, a preventative vaccine has been notoriously difficult to produce. To overcome this, a vaccine using non-structural protein 3 (NS3) as a target to elicit a T cell specific immune response is thought to be a possible strategy for eliciting a protective immune response against hepatitis C infection. In this paper, a recombinant strain of measles virus (MV) that expresses HCV NS3 protein was analyzed. The replication fitness of this recombinant virus also indicates that this construct replicates at a higher rate than parental measles strain. It is also demonstrated through western blot analysis of protein expression and immunofluorescence that this recombinant virus expresses both the inserted HCV NS3 protein, as well as native measles proteins.
ContributorsWoell, Dana Marie (Author) / Reyes del Valle, Jorge (Thesis director) / Nickerson, Cheryl (Committee member) / Julik, Emily (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
With an excessive amount of resources in the United States healthcare system being spent on the treatment of diseases that are largely preventable through lifestyle change, the need for successful physical activity interventions is apparent. Unfortunately an individual's physical activity and health goals are often not supported by the social context of their daily lives. This single-case design study, Walking Intervention through Text messaging for CoHabiting individuals (WalkIT CoHab), looks at the efficacy of a text based adaptive physical activity intervention to promote walking over a three month period and the effects of social support in intervention performance in three pairs of cohabiting pairs of individuals (n=6). Mean step increase from baseline to intervention ranged from 1300 to 3000 steps per day for all individuals, an average 45.87% increase in physical activity. Goal attainment during the intervention ranged from 43.96% to 71.43%, meaning all participants exceeded the 40% success rate predicted by 60th percentile goals. Social support scores for study partners, unlike social support scores for family and friends, were often in the high social support range and had a moderate increase from pre to post visits for most participants. Although there was variation amongst participants, there was a high correlation in physical activity trends and successful goal attainment in each pair of participants. Less ambitious percentile goals and more personalized motivational text messages might be beneficial to some participants. An extended intervention, something the majority of participants expressed interest in, would further support the efficacy of this behavioral intervention and allow for possible long term benefits of social support in the intervention to be investigated.
ContributorsFernandez, Jacqueline Alyssa (Author) / Adams, Marc (Thesis director) / Angadi, Siddhartha (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
We model communication among social insects as an interacting particle system in which individuals perform one of two tasks and neighboring sites anti-mimic one another. Parameters of our model are a probability of defection 2 (0; 1) and relative cost ci > 0 to the individual performing task i. We examine this process on complete graphs, bipartite graphs, and the integers, answering questions about the relationship between communication, defection rates and the division of labor. Assuming the division of labor is ideal when exactly half of the colony is performing each task, we nd that on some bipartite graphs and the integers it can eventually be made arbitrarily close to optimal if defection rates are sufficiently small. On complete graphs the fraction of individuals performing each task is also closest to one half when there is no defection, but is bounded by a constant dependent on the relative costs of each task.
ContributorsArcuri, Alesandro Antonio (Author) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Thesis director) / Kang, Yun (Committee member) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Nutritional balance is a requirement for the survival of all species. This balance is important for complex eusocial organisms as it influences the growth and development of the colony. Leafcutter ants function as tri-trophic systems, harvesting mixed vegetation to cultivate a fungus garden that in return supplies the colony with food. Examining how the colony deals with nutrient balance is of particular interest because this species forages to provide nutrients for the fungus. There seems to be a feedback system between the fungus and the workers that influences how much of a particular macronutrient should be collected. The objective of this thesis study was to examine the foraging behavior of the desert leaf cutter ant, Acromyrmex versicolor. This study asked how nutrition, in particular the ratio of carbohydrates to proteins, influences the foraging behavior of the colony. It was hypothesized that given a choice of high protein and high carbohydrate diets the leafcutters would forage towards a balance ratio. The results from this experiment showed that A. versicolor forage towards a target ratio of protein to carbohydrate to based diets. This p:c ratio was calculated to be 1:6.2; 1 gram of protein to 6.2 grams of carbohydrate. When colonies were restricted to the high carbohydrate diet, they increased food consumption, consistent with the expectation that they would forage to reach their protein nutrient requirement, however, they reduced foraging on that diet. This suggests that ants avoid overconsuming protein, even when doing so provided more optimal carbohydrate intake. From this study I concluded that nutritional balance is a foraging goal for ant societies, similar to organisms. These results also open the question of how nutrient regulation by leafcutter ants is regulated around their mutualist relationship with another organism, the fungus.
ContributorsFarris, Megan Alexandra (Author) / Fewell, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Harrison, Jon (Committee member) / Smith, Nate (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Clean water for drinking, food preparation, and bathing is essential for astronaut health and safety during long duration habitation of the International Space Station (ISS), including future missions to Mars. Despite stringent water treatment and recycling efforts on the ISS, it is impossible to completely prevent microbial contamination of onboard water supplies. In this work, we used a spaceflight analogue culture system to better understand how the microgravity environment can influence the pathogenesis-related characteristics of Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc), an opportunistic pathogen previously recovered from the ISS water system. The results of the present study suggest that there may be important differences in how this pathogen can respond and adapt to spaceflight and other low fluid shear environments encountered during their natural life cycles. Future studies are aimed at understanding the underlying mechanisms responsible for these phenotypes.
ContributorsKang, Bianca Younseon (Author) / Nickerson, Cheryl (Thesis director) / Barrila, Jennifer (Committee member) / Ott, Mark (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
An increasingly sedentary population in the United States, specifically with adolescents, is putting youth at risk of future health related trauma and disease. This single-case design study, Walking Intervention Through Text Messaging for Adolescents (WalkIT-A), was used to intervene with a 12-year old, physically inactive male, in an attempt to test the efficacy of a 12-week physical activity program that may help reduce health risks by increasing number of steps walked per day. The components of the intervention consisted of a FitBit Zip pedometer, physical activity education, text messages, monetary incentives, and goal setting that adapted personally to the participant. Mean step count increased by 30% from baseline (mean = 3603 [sd = 1983]) to intervention (mean = 4693 [sd = 2112]); then increased slightly by 6.7% from intervention to withdrawal (mean = 5009 [sd = 2152]). Mean "very active minutes" increased by 45% from baseline (mean = 8.8 [sd = 8.9]) to intervention (mean = 12.8 [sd = 9.6]); then increased by 61.7% from intervention to withdrawal (mean = 20.7 [sd = 8.4]). Weight, BMI, and blood pressure all increased modestly from pre to post. Cardiovascular fitness (estimated VO2 max) improved by 12.5% from pre (25.5ml*kg-1*min-1) to post (28.7ml*kg-1*min-1). The intervention appeared to have a delayed and residual effect on the participant's daily steps and very active minutes. Although the idealistic ABA pattern did not occur, and the participant did not meet the target of 11,500 daily steps, a positive trend toward that target behavior in the latter 1/3rd of the intervention was observed. Results suggest the need for an extended intervention over a longer period of time and customized even further to the participant.
ContributorsLamb, Nicholas Reid (Author) / Adams, Marc (Thesis director) / Ainsworth, Barbara (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
Division of labor among task specialists is a key feature of the organization of insect societies. Foraging and emigration are two distinct colony tasks that nonetheless depend on very similar behaviors, including searching outside the nest, evaluating discoveries, and recruiting nestmates. These subtasks are crucial to collective decisions about forager allocation and nest site selection. It remains unclear, however, whether the same ants are responsible for similar behavior in both contexts, and to what degree they show finer specializations among common subtasks. We are investigating these issues in the ant Temnothorax rugatulus, by making detailed behavioral descriptions of individually marked colonies as they forage and emigrate. There exists considerable heterogeneity among nest-movers, with a small proportion consistently responsible for a large share of recruitment. We found a similar pattern of heterogeneity amongst ants retrieving food during foraging, but had inconclusive results when examining recruitment to the food. It also appears that the ants that complete tasks during foraging are different from the ants that complete similar tasks during emigrations. These findings will shed light on the organization of division of labor and how it contributes to collective decision-making.
ContributorsSchaper, Gage (Contributor) / Pratt, Stephen (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Shaffer, Zachary (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
I tested the hypothesis that in mature colonies of the seed harvester Pogonomyrmex californicus ant species, paired pleometrotic queens would produce workers more efficiently after a massive removal of their work force than haplometrotic queens, paired pleometrotic with haplometrotic queens, and single pleometrotic queens. I suggested that the paired pleometrotic queens would have an advantage of cooperating together in reproducing more workers quicker than the other conditions to make up for the lost workers. This would demonstrate a benefit that pleometrosis has over haplometrosis for mature colonies, which would explain why pleometrosis continues for P.californicus after colony foundation. After removing all but twenty workers for every colony, I took pictures and counted the emerging brood for 52 days. Analyses showed that the paired pleometrotic queens and the haplometrotic queens both grew at an equally efficient rate and the paired pleometrotic and haplometrotic queens growing the least efficiently. However, the results were not significant and did not support the hypothesis that paired pleometrotic queens recover from worker loss more proficiently than other social systems.
ContributorsFernandez, Marisa Raquel (Author) / Fewell, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Gadau, Juergen (Committee member) / Haney, Brian (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Analytic research on basketball games is growing quickly, specifically in the National Basketball Association. This paper explored the development of this analytic research and discovered that there has been a focus on individual player metrics and a dearth of quantitative team characterizations and evaluations. Consequently, this paper continued the exploratory research of Fewell and Armbruster's "Basketball teams as strategic networks" (2012), which modeled basketball teams as networks and used metrics to characterize team strategy in the NBA's 2010 playoffs. Individual players and outcomes were nodes and passes and actions were the links. This paper used data that was recorded from playoff games of the two 2012 NBA finalists: the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder. The same metrics that Fewell and Armbruster used were explained, then calculated using this data. The offensive networks of these two teams during the playoffs were analyzed and interpreted by using other data and qualitative characterization of the teams' strategies; the paper found that the calculated metrics largely matched with our qualitative characterizations of the teams. The validity of the metrics in this paper and Fewell and Armbruster's paper was then discussed, and modeling basketball teams as multiple-order Markov chains rather than as networks was explored.
ContributorsMohanraj, Hariharan (Co-author) / Choi, David (Co-author) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Brooks, Daniel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2013-05