Research Project Design

By Corinne Tarantino

          Time is one of the greatest challenges in this OTS course. Some challenges include time to have breaks, time to complete assignments, time to study, but most importantly time to design projects, execute them, and write up the paper. The course pushes you to be able to work under time constraints, and I have learned a lot from the experience.

            Experimental design has always been one of my favorite parts of science, because you get to figure out how to form a working experiment. Initially, we had many ideas for our independent project. Quickly, we learned one of the biggest limitations to design is equipment. In many situations, you may have access to a lot of technology, but in our case, we were limited to standard supplies like petri dishes, dissecting scopes, scales, and ovens. Therefore, the project couldn’t involve anything with chemical analysis. We had to be creative about what projects would not require intricate technology.

            I also learned there are generally two approaches to coming up with a project: find a model system and ask a question or ask a question and find a model system. We tried both approaches at times and ultimately settled on a middle ground. After several tries, we had a model system, an ant seed dispersal system that is commonly found at La Selva Biological Station. We searched for a genus of ants that disperse the seeds, trap-jaw ants. This is typically a carnivorous ant, with the exception of eating a lipid-coat on the outside of the seed, that forages with their mandibles open, ready to “trap” prey. We found one of these ants moving a worm and enjoyed watching the ant. However, the ants are solitary foragers (they look for prey individually), so it is a little bit tricky to locate them or a nest. Therefore, in a five-day project it is not feasible to study their habits. We still had the option of finding the seeds and looking at characteristics of ants moving the seeds. However, we decided to change ideas completely.

            We went back into our field notebooks and found a comment written about epiphylls (species of plants like mosses and lichens that grow on the surface of the leaf). As soon as we thought about working with them, we asked about feasibility. We learned past projects have used a common palm that had many epiphylls. Then it was time to come up with a project. We found a few experiments regarding plant-plant interactions involving climate change and thought that would be an interesting topic. We looked up literature about epiphyll effects on plants and couldn’t find a lot. Finally, we settled on looking at epiphyll effects on water retention rates. Finding a methodology to test our question was another challenge. During the process we learned many lessons, including how to share equipment with other researchers and how even simple equipment can have technical difficulties.

            Overall, I have learned a lot about the challenges of designing a research project. Most importantly, I have found a way to do a viable research project within time, budget and equipment constraints. Now, I feel more prepared to conduct research in the future with less limitations.