Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
At Cornell University, a lab involving fruit fly breeding has been abandoned following the campus’ spring 2020 closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.
BY MAEVE BRADY ’20
The recent rapid spread of the coronavirus has shut down everything from bars and restaurants to major sporting events. Many college and university campuses now sit almost deserted, their student body having been sent home due to the pandemic. Unfortunately, this has also led to a widespread halt on a variety of scientific studies that took place in labs on these campuses, as well as those that had their homes in museums that are now closed to all but the essential employees. Of course, lots of work is relatively easy to do from home, but other research will suffer if those running the studies cannot get into their labs.
For studies that concern living creatures like spiders or plankton, this shutdown has been especially problematic and has left researchers scrambling for solutions to keep their specimens alive. From analysis of the behavior of fruit flies to paleontological research on vertebrates, scientific studies are now facing severe setbacks due to pandemic-induced lockdowns.
At Cornell University, research on the physics of insect flight has been grounded as a month’s worth of fruit fly breeding has had to be thrown out. Flies for future study are being stored in refrigerators, but the most progress that researchers in this lab can hope for right now is that they will be able to write more papers during quarantine.
Meanwhile, the shutdown of a lab at Vanderbilt University that was studying tissue-engineered bone constructs means that some experiments that would have taken another two months to finish must be discarded. At the City University of New York, the bioluminescent plankton that are being studied must be monitored carefully to avoid the culture of plankton crashing and researchers having to rebuild from scratch.
David Gruber, who is caring for the plankton while his lab is closed, told The New York Times that the team will “try to squeeze what we can out of existing data.” He believes that they have enough data collected for about six months of hands-off research. Hopefully, the lab can reopen before that time is up.
However, while some researchers have taken Dr. Gruber’s route and are organizing visits to the lab to monitor their specimens, others have been able to bring the subjects of their research home. Dr. Jason Macrander — who teaches marine biology at Florida Southern College — has brought hundreds of sea anemones and their accompanying clownfish home from his lab.
He told The New York Times that he has been “frantically trying to clean and feed, and do what I can when I can. I’m just trying to keep it all alive.”
Similarly, Caitlin Henderson, who had recently become a spider zookeeper at the Queensland Museum in Australia, found herself with roughly 50 spiders to take home and look after while the museum was closed. Although adapting to this many new guests in the home is difficult, Macrander and Henderson have each recruited help. Macrander’s young children help to feed the class pets — a frog and a turtle — that he brought home in addition to the anemone specimens, and Henderson’s roommates have come around to the many spiders now living in their home. They have even helped her make fun, informational videos for the museum in which the spiders have the spotlight.
Bringing specimens home is not applicable to all research and living situations. However, it is one creative approach to the shutdown of labs in an extremely challenging time for anyone conducting scientific studies.