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Showcase College of Arts and Sciences

Using eDNA to assess the effects of Sierra Nevada meadow restoration on invasive species and sensitive amphibians

Using eDNA to assess the effects of Sierra Nevada meadow restoration on invasive species and sensitive amphibians

Primary author: Nicolette Nelson
Faculty sponsor: Jonah Piovia-Scott

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Vancouver

Abstract:

Managers in the Sierra Nevada are increasingly restoring degraded wet meadows in order to recover essential ecosystem services (e.g. water storage and filtration) and to benefit native wildlife. These projects may increase available habitat for federally-listed amphibians, but some projects have unintentionally prompted the spread of invasive species that negatively impact native amphibians through predation, competition, and disease. In order to assess the effects of meadow restoration on invasive species and sensitive amphibians, we used a backpack sampler to collect environmental DNA (eDNA) samples at 23 restored and 23 paired unrestored Sierra Nevada meadows during the summers of 2018 and 2019. Quantitative PCR was used to detect the presence of American bullfrogs (Lithobates catesbeianus), Amphibian chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, Bd), and Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frogs (Rana sierrae). R. sierrae were detected at only one site, which may be explained by the relatively low elevation of study sites and the degraded condition of unrestored meadows. Preliminary analysis suggested that L. catesbeianus were associated with pond-and-plug restoration sites, which result in the creation of novel permanent ponds, and Bd was slightly associated with bullfrogs. Our results indicate that wet meadow restoration in the Sierra Nevada may not be directly benefiting sensitive amphibians. Additionally, pond-and-plug restoration may facilitate the spread of some invasive species more than other restoration methods such as beaver dam analogues that aim to mimic natural meadow formation processes.

A Comparative Study of the Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile)

A Comparative Study of the Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile)

Primary author: Vilma Navarro-Daniels
Co-author(s): Maria Serenella Previto

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Pullman

Abstract:

The Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance houses a huge collection of documents, pictures, videos, and artifacts related to the resistance against Trujillo. It is visited by hundreds of Dominicans from all over the country as well as schoolers and their teachers. Dominicans do not doubt about the dictatorial nature of Trujillo’s rule (1930-1961). Although in Chile there is a Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Chilean people do not share a common memory about the Pinochet Era (1973-1990). My research focuses on the role and impact that the aforementioned museums and the way they were implemented, promoted, advertised, and interpreted from hegemonic centers of political power may have had on nowadays Chilean historical denial of the political genocide that took place under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in opposition to the well consolidated and shared memory about the atrocities committed during the Trujillo Era that can be observed in Dominican Republic. Thus, my research studies and analyzes these museums in connection to the politics of memory or – conversely— oblivion, the latter also named Historical Alzheimer, and makes progress in the theoretical understanding of museums as components of urban spaces, which are protected and managed in order to achieve very precise goals: Museums are texts, meaning they are narrations that shape nations (Homi Bhabha) and, by doing so, they create a “usable past” (Henry Steele Commager), which, in turn, will form and set up future citizens as either anchored in a shared past or, on the contrary, detached from their own history.

Critical Perspectives on Gender and Colonialism

Critical Perspectives on Gender and Colonialism

Primary author: Pavithra Narayanan

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Vancouver

Abstract:

In a globalized world, heir to two centuries of unprecedented economic, social, political, environmental, and cultural transformation, few changes are as radical as anti-colonial and feminist challenges to patriarchal gender and sexuality conventions. Converging threads in the disciplines of History, English, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies to highlight the divergent effects of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and post-colonialism globally, WSU Vancouver and Pullman Humanities faculty organized a spring 2019 interdisciplinary Gender and Colonialism Humanities Symposium at the WSU Vancouver campus. This collaborative project was sponsored by the WSU Arts & Humanities Center.
The poster will highlight the innovative research of ten scholars from West Coast universities who were invited to participate in the symposium. The first panel on “decolonizing history/historiographies” examined how the academe privileges certain discourses while excluding others and reinterpreting gendered themes like motherhood and family from the perspectives of activism, agency, and desire. The second, on “dissonant/unruly bodies,” offered deeply nuanced interpretations of how enslaved Jamaican women perceived their own mothering practices; contemporary mythologies of orientalized bellydancing in Latin America; a memoir and investigation of queer/trans spaces in Los Angeles; and a historical investigation of healthy women assigned to do the laundry of people suffering from leprosy in Molakai. The final panel, “Gendered Spaces in Empire,” was historical and focused on ideologies of gender in Mexico, Okinawa, and India. The discussion that followed brought back the morning’s calls to “decolonization of the academe” to consider the political implications of the ways that some historical arguments framed their inquiries.

A multiplicity of barriers: The self-employment of immigrant Hispanic women in the United States

A multiplicity of barriers: The self-employment of immigrant Hispanic women in the United States

Primary author: Samuel Mindes

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Pullman

Abstract:

A range of factors influences the economic opportunities for Hispanic women. These barriers include family construction, such as marital status, children at home, and living arrangements. Economic opportunities also hinge on educational and employment history, the status of the local economy, the composition of the local community, and a range of other individual characteristics. Indeed, these critical barriers overlap and interact with cultural expectations. Chiefly to this is immigration status, which is a crucial backdrop to these barriers due to cultural tensions and family expectations. These barriers are particularly central to shaping involvement in the self-employment sector, which is more contingent on these dynamics than wage work. Furthermore, self-employed business incorporation also hinges on these and other factors. We investigate how personal, familial, and social factors influence self-employment propensity and business incorporation for Hispanic women at the intersection of Hispanic group membership and immigrant status. While incorporation offers essential benefits, such as protection of assets, credibility, access to capital, and tax advantages, it also requires more capital and thus has additional barriers. For Hispanic women, barriers to economic success are numerous. However, self-employment can be both an opportunity to find success or a last-ditch effort to have some source of income. Through statistical modeling of American Community Survey data, we explain the impact of individual and social characteristics on the self-employment of Hispanic women in the United States. Our results find that one’s immigrant generation and Hispanic group is central to shaping the impact of individual, family, and social characteristics.

Adaptive evolution in extreme environments

Adaptive evolution in extreme environments

Primary author: Kerry McGowan
Faculty sponsor: Joanna L. Kelley

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Pullman

Abstract:

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a lethal gas for most organisms because it inhibits aerobic respiration. However, the fish Poecilia mexicana successfully colonized several springs with high H2S after migrating from nearby freshwater springs. There are known H2S-related changes in gene expression in P. mexicana, but the underlying regulatory changes that control them are unknown. We hypothesized the following: (1)Transcription factors (TFs), which bind to DNA and regulate gene expression, would vary in their expression in P. mexicana based on the presence/absence of H2S. (2)TFs would co-vary with the expression of genes involved in aerobic metabolism and H2S detoxification. We performed network analyses on gene expression data from wild-caught P. mexicana from freshwater and H2S springs and lab-reared individuals exposed to H2S. The network analyses clustered genes into modules based on their expression levels across different treatments, allowing us to draw conclusions regarding the connectivity of these biological networks. Several TFs clustered in one module that significantly correlated with habitat (freshwater versus H2S) in wild-caught P. mexicana. Several aerobic respiration-related genes significantly correlated with different springs, indicating P. mexicana may have evolved different strategies to adapt to H2S. These results indicate that H2S affects the regulation of genes involved in aerobic respiration. As aerobic respiration includes some of the most evolutionarily conserved metabolic pathways in animals, this testifies to the potential of H2S to drive adaptive evolution. Understanding H2S metabolism in these fish will help inform the use of H2S as a therapeutic to treat human conditions.

Breastfeeding patterns in four cultures: A cross cultural analysis

Breastfeeding patterns in four cultures: A cross cultural analysis

Primary author: Courtney Love
Co-authors: Katherine Flores, Beatrice Caffe, Avery Lane, Courtney Helfrecht, Courtney L. Meehan
Faculty sponsor: Courtney Meehan

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Pullman

Abstract:

Breastfeeding, widely acknowledged to have significant benefits to infant growth and development, maternal-infant bonding, and infant immunity, is also one of the most intensive and energetically expensive forms of maternal investment. Despite these noteworthy benefits, we lack foundational data regarding the underlying daily structure (e.g., frequency and number of bouts, temporal and developmental variation) of breastfeeding, particularly in cross-cultural perspective. Here we present data on breastfeeding structure in four cultures and test the broad hypothesis that maternal and infant life history characteristics and allomaternal investment are related to infant nursing patterns. Data were analyzed on 226 infants and children via naturalistic focal follow behavioral observations, which recorded infant behavior every 30 seconds across daylight hours, among hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists in the Central African Republic, agro-pastoralists in Ethiopia, and Washington/Idaho women living in a semi-rural community in the US. Our results support the hypotheses that several life history characteristics (e.g., infant age, sex, and allomaternal network size) are associated with nursing frequency. Understanding the daily structure of breastfeeding across subsistence patterns can help us understand cross-cultural variation, in addition to illustrating how life history traits influence maternal investment strategies on a critical investment pattern with clear fitness consequences.

BAM!: Chicago’s Black Arts Movement

BAM!: Chicago’s Black Arts Movement

Primary author: Thabiti Lewis
Co-author(s): Pavithra Narayanan

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Vancouver

Abstract:

The film examines the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, which is an epicenter of the black diaspora. The film “BAM! Chicago’s Black Arts Movement” features interviews with Museum director Carol Adams, publisher and poet Haki Madhubuti, Safisha Madhubuti, Eugene Redmond, Mwata Bowden, Angela Jackson and many other artists and scholars. The film introduces viewers to the history of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (BAM) and reflects on the extensive national and international impact of Chicago’s Black writers, musicians and community organizers and the organizations and institutions that they supported and founded including the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), Negro Digest/Black World, Ebony Talent Agency (ETA), the DuSable Museum, Third World Press, Johnson Publishing, Kuumba Theatre, and the South Side Community Arts Center.
The film explores the 1960s era of art and politics and why Chicago emerged as one of the most important cities and was able to be such an influential matrix for Black communities across the country seeking to duplicate Chicago’s institutional building and arts scene.
Preview of Film: https://vimeo.com/295695342
Runtime: 55 minutes

REMOTE: VOICES OF THE WILDERNESS

REMOTE: VOICES OF THE WILDERNESS

Primary author: DJ Lee

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Pullman

Abstract:

The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, one of the most remote landscapes in the U.S., stretches across Idaho and Montana in the Northern Rockies, where it borders the Frank Church River of No Return and the Gospel Hump Wildernesses to form the largest roadless wildland in the lower 48 states at over 5 million acres. I, my co-PI at the University of Idaho, WSU graduate students, and digital librarians, received the prestigious NEH Collaborative Research Grant for the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project in 2010. We collected 16 linear feet of photographs, maps, and documents and conducted 50 oral history interviews—the first ever digital and analog archive of a single Wilderness area. In 2014, our project was honored during the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, solidifying its importance to Wilderness studies in the U.S. and worldwide. Since then, the value of Wilderness has increased globally as it becomes clear how vital large, roadless wildlands are for carbon sequestration, wild animal habitat, and biodiversity, not to mention spiritual renewal. Two creative products designed to reach larger audiences have grown from the project: 1) a podcast of curated stories from oral history interviewees with photo slideshows; 2) my creative nonfiction book, REMOTE: FINDING HOME IN THE BITTERROOTS from Oregon State University Press, forthcoming March 3, 2020. REMOTE was featured as one the most anticipated books by the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association in October 2019. My Showcase Poster will focus on the creative products and processes of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Project.

Acute Effects of High-Potency Cannabis on Everyday Life Cognition

Acute Effects of High-Potency Cannabis on Everyday Life Cognition

Primary author: Emily LaFrance
Faculty sponsor: Carrie Cuttler, PhD

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Pullman

Abstract:

Previous research indicates that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary constituent in cannabis, impairs memory and may affect risky decision-making. A small body of research further suggests that cannabidiol (CBD), which is also found in cannabis, may offset memory impairments. However, research demonstrating these effects has primarily utilized low THC ( 20% THC) cannabis and cannabis concentrates (> 60% THC) on cognition, and ii) to assess the role of CBD in the acute effects of cannabis on cognition. To achieve these aims, a between-subjects field experiment using Zoom videoconferencing software was employed. Participants in this study purchased a specific type of cannabis and then engaged in videoconferencing testing session from their home via Zoom. During this session, participants were observed while inhaling cannabis or remaining sober, and then completed tests of their memory (prospective, source, temporal order, and false memory) and decision making (risky choice framing, consistency in risk perception, resistance to sunk cost, and over/under confidence). Most of these tests measure aspects of cognition that have never been investigated under conditions of acute cannabis intoxication. Preliminary results indicate that cannabis intoxication impairs source memory and false memory but does not significantly impact decision making. CBD does not appear to offset these impairments. Results of this study have implications for cannabis users, and health practitioners working with cannabis-using populations.

Gene expression varies with disease and parasitism in the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) skin transcriptome

Gene expression varies with disease and parasitism in the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) skin transcriptome

Primary author: Rachael Kane
Faculty sponsor: Andrew Storfer

Primary college/unit: Arts and Sciences
Campus: Pullman

Abstract:

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are a major threat to biodiversity in the 21st Century. Fibropapillomatosis (FP) has been classified as an EID and it plagues both juvenile and adult marine turtles. FP is an epithelial tumor disease that affects marine turtles globally. While FP tumor gene expression has been characterized, no transcriptomics studies have been performed on healthy Chelonia mydas individuals or tissues. Here, we perform RNA-Seq on healthy skin tissue of juvenile C. mydas individuals with FP and without FP from the Indian River Lagoon, Florida, USA. We assembled a de novo C. mydas transcriptome to identify significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs) based on turtle presence of FP tumors and leech parasitism. Significantly DEGs were found in all expression analyses and included candidate genes that may play a role in C. mydas recovery from FP. Although tumor inhibition genes were found to be expressed in both FP-negative and positive individuals, positive individuals had twice as many upregulated significantly differentially expressed genes, indicating a possible response to FP affliction. A general trend of downregulated intra- and inter- cell signaling genes was observed in the leech infected individuals. A Gene Ontology enrichment analysis showed few enriched biological processes. Interestingly, FP-negative individuals showed enrichment of T cell cytokine production. Clearly, C. mydas respond to disease and parasitism by regulating their transcription, and transcriptomics provides a promising venue to further explore this crippling disease.