This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Aquatic insects play critical ecological roles and are of practical importance due to their widespread use in biomonitoring programs. Nevertheless, their use as ecological indicators is limited in part, because the fundamental physiological processes that determine their responses to environmental challenges are poorly understood. Because there are so many aquatic insect species, it is impossible to perform the types of physiological experimentation required to characterize species-specific responses to common environmental problems. This project will explore whether the evolutionary relatedness of species can be used as a predictor of their physiological performance in response to trace metal pollution. The physiological systems under study include ion regulation (fluxes of calcium, zinc and cadmium) and antioxidant physiology. This novel marriage of ecophysiology with modern phylogenetic comparative methods in evolutionary biology has the capacity to fundamentally change the study of aquatic insects and their responses to changing environments. Traditionally, the study of aquatic insects has focused on guild school approaches and has largely ignored physiology. This research will make predictions of species performance based upon both physiology and phylogeny. This program will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups as it includes support for summer undergraduate interns from Shaw University, the oldest Historically Black College in the South, and a workshop for high school biology teachers from rural and Native American communities in the Appalachians. This workshop will assist teachers in the development of inquiry-based programs that explore themes of ecology and evolution in stream environments. Finally, the results of this program will be broadly beneficial to society, as aquatic insects are commonly used to evaluate the ecological conditions of surface waters worldwide.
