Dr. Jalene LaMontagne is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at DePaul University, and is an Adjunct Scientist with the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Her research is concentrated on how patterns in plant and animal populations change across landscapes and how they’re impacted by their environments.

When Dr. Jalene LaMontagne was growing up, her family moved every three to five years. “I was a military brat,” she says. For a while they lived in Cold Lake, Alberta, a very remote area in northern Canada. “Basically there was our house and community, and a park across the street and then we were surrounded by spruce forest.” Jalene and a group of friends played in a particular cluster of white spruce trees whose trunks grew close enough together that their branches provided protection from rain. That space turned into a fort, a clubhouse, and a place to reenact scenes from Star Wars.

The species of white spruce seems to have followed Jalene around—or perhaps, inadvertently, she followed it. “When I was doing my PhD research, it was the only species in the whole valley. I was in the Yukon, in northern Canada and literally, it was the only conifer species in the entire area.”

Today, Jalene alternates between her work on white spruce in remote, northern regions and urban work in the city of Chicago, where she researches how the availability of nesting sites and food influences wildlife species found in the city.

 Working with graduate students and other collaborators, Jalene and her team tackle a variety of interesting questions at the LaMontagne Lab at DePaul University. If you would like to support the ongoing research in Jalene’s lab, you can make a contribution to the work that she and her students do. Go to this page to give online; and under “Other Funds” write in that you’d like to direct your gift to “Biological Sciences Department – LaMontagne Lab Research.”

Here’s the pine marten Jalene talks about in this episode. It was spotted in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, at one of the white spruce study sites.

The summer field crew in the Huron Mountains in the Upper Peninsula: Jalene and students from DePaul University. Graduate student Evan Cowles; Jalene LaMontagne, graduate student Abby Leeper; undergraduate student Hanna Kemp.

Dr. Melina Hale is the William Rainey Harper Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the College at The University of Chicago. Melina studies how animals move and how those movements are controlled by the brain. Melina is also a Vice Provost at the university and lives in Hyde Park with her husband, three kids and their dog.

Most scientists study animals while they’re stationary. It’s a lot easier that way. But Melina Hale studies fish in motion. She wants to find out what’s happening inside their brains—and what signals are traveling through their system from brain to fin and fin to brain—that allow movement to occur.

You wouldn’t necessarily think it, but the brain of a fish and the brain of a person have a lot in common. What the fish contemplates may be different from what we think about, but how we conduct the process of thinking is similar. So when Melina figured out how the startle reflex works in fish and which neurons control it, that also explained how humans startle. “These little three-millimeter fish provide a window into the brain that we couldn’t get at in any other way,” says Melina.

When Melina’s sons were little, she would make guesses about what was happening inside their brains. “It was fascinating to watch the changes and how they were able to move,” Melina says. “From crawling to walking, I was associating it with what was happening in their spinal cords or neural circuitry.”

A lot of other projects are underway at Melina’s lab at the University of Chicago, and you can learn about those here. She also is a research fellow at the university’s Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts—which is a cool place to know about in and of itself.

This article explains more about the breakthrough realization that the fins of fish have sensors that are sending signals to the brain and not just vice versa—something Melina talks about in the episode.

This video from the National Science Foundation provides a nice overview of Melina’s work, and how, as the Foundation puts it, “one tiny fish can teach us big ideas about how the brain’s circuitry works.”

Aquariums stacked up in Melina Hale’s laboratory. They’re filled not only with larval zebra fish; graduate students study biomechanics of various fish species.

Laboratories are more than just centrifuges, test tubes and ah-ha moments. Here’s one of the workspaces in Melina’s lab.

Melina and her team of grad students studied how the African Lungfish walks on its hind limbs. This species is likely related to the very first fish-like creatures that crawled out of the water and started to live on land. (Our ancestor!) This article in Scientific American explains more about that research.

Sylvie Anglin is Principal of the Lower School at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Prior to that, she was a classroom teacher at the school for thirteen years.

Sylvie Anglin’s epiphany of how nature can integrate into both the curriculum and character of a classroom occurred the year she co-taught with Carol Brindley, a veteran teacher of first and second graders. Each student was given a flower bulb to plant in a pot indoors. “Every couple of days, the children would measure the growth, but they would also draw, they would look really, really closely at what was happening,” says Sylvie. “Ms. Brindley would push the children to draw exactly what was there, to take time to look carefully. It was a repeated connection in a relationship with nature—it wasn’t just a one-time thing. At the end, you could line up the drawings in a sequential order and watch how the bulb grew into a beautiful flower.”

Sylvie’s interest turned to action. Each year in various classrooms, she incorporated repeated trips to one particular natural area, and assigned students the task of making field guides of plants and animals observed. Sylvie found ways to integrate those lessons into other aspects of that grade’s curriculum—and vice versa. “When I think about what schools should be and how we inspire kids, it’s not having a whole bunch of subjects that are separate from each other. It’s looking for how things connect.”

The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools has additional images and information about outdoor education and sustainability here. There’s a nice video of storytelling by the firepit.

If you’re interested in the program Sylvie mentioned where she borrowed specimens from a museum and brought them into her classroom, that’s the Harris Learning Collection at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Educators can check out taxidermied birds andmammals and other items, like from a library. Teachers use the loaned items at school for short periods of time, and then return them to the museum.

Outdoor classroom at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Science teachers thought up the idea for having the outdoor classroom, but it’s used for all academic subjects. It’s also a place for convening older children at the school with young ones from nursery school through the school’s “buddy program.”

Use of the outdoor classroom continues in winter. Lab School’s founder, John Dewey, was a philosopher, and psychologist with progressive ideas about education. Dewey influenced social reform in the late 1800s and early 1900s. From its earliest days, Lab School had children moving fluidly between indoors and out. In 1938, Dewey wrote, “Today’s child is in danger of losing contact with primitive realities – with the world, with the space about us, with fields, with rivers, with the problems of getting shelter and of obtaining food that have always conditioned life and that still do.”

Dr. Peggy Mason is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago. After twenty-five years studying the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation, Peggy expanded her lab’s work to focus primarily on the biological basis of empathy and helping. In addition to leading the research laboratory, Peggy is a committed teacher of neurobiology, teaching both formally (at the University) and informally, through her blog and a popular free, online course. 

As a child, Peggy Mason was a biology prodigy. By the age of nine she was assisting the zoologist Dr. Charles Handley in teaching taxidermy at the Smithsonian. Today, as a neurobiologist, Peggy is still working with mammals but now she’s studying whether they experience empathy and act to help one another.

Peggy was studying the subject of pain modulation until a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, asked if she’d be interested in expanding her work to collaborate on a project about empathy. “I went over to see her that same day,” says Peggy, and the upshot was the discovery that like humans, rats have an aversion to witnessing the distress of others and a strong motivation to help someone else who’s suffering.

You’ll love this video from Nova that shows one rat deliberately setting free another rat that’s trapped. Later, the rat is confronted with the question of which to do first: save some rat it had never even met before, or wolf down the chocolate Peggy offered? Also, here’s the article in Science magazine.

On Coursera, take “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Every Day Life,” a free course taught by Peggy. Also you can gain more insights from Peggy by subscribing to her blog, which is fascinating and far-reaching in its subject matter.

Johana Goyes Vallejos is an evolutionary behavioral ecologist interested in sexual selection and the evolution of mating systems. She researches mate choice, parental care, natural history and communication in animals, including frogs.

When Johana Goyes Vallejos travelled to Borneo , she discovered that instead of boy frogs making all the noise—which is how things typically go in frog world—it was female voices piercing the night air. Loud and proud, female guardian frogs searched for and pursued males instead of the other way around.

Johana also discovered that after the females laid eggs, their male mates stuck around and watched to make sure the eggs were safe. Then, once the tadpoles hatched, the dads did something extraordinarily sweet. The tiny tadpoles climbed onto their backs, and with offspring hanging on piggyback, the dads would take off. They hopped around the general vicinity until they located water bodies where the tadpoles could grow, and then they deposited the tadpoles in the water.

Biologists call this sex role reversal, and while it’s not common, sex role reversal is fascinating. Studying its occurrences adds to a more complete picture of sex roles in animals.

Johana is a postdoctoral research associate at the ​Biodiversity Institute at the University of Kansas and here is her website. The New York Times wrote an article about Johana’s discovery, and here’s a video where Johana speaks about this part of her research. National Geographic has an article in Spanish about the findings.

Watch this video to the end—it’s worth it! You’ll see the male guardian frog watching eggs, and later the tadpoles climb aboard for their ride.

This male smooth guardian frog, Limnonectes palavanensis, is carrying tadpoles on his back. The males are the ones who provide parental care in this particular species. Johana discovered this at a biological field station in Brunei, a small country on the island of Borneo in the South Pacific.