Less than 200 years ago, Auburn and the surrounding area was an undeveloped wilderness teeming with diverse species of flora and fauna.
Though development and growth have altered the landscape, graduate students in Auburn University's biology department are striving to preserve Lee County's ecosystem.
"Our main effort in the Live Animal Lab is to keep animals from getting killed," said Katelyn Henderson, senior in zoology. "The live animal collection is mostly rescued snakes from people owning them illegally. Once we find out about it, we go in as Auburn University and pick up the snakes."
According to Henderson, the University's biology department is the only organization in town that will deal with unwanted animals, such as the Eastern indigo and rat snakes, without killing them.
The Live Animal Lab, a haven for dislocated animals from around town, provides researchers with live specimens and form the basis of several ongoing conservation projects.
Among the animals in the room are a California king snake, Gila monsters and a tank of newborn alligators.
Henderson, undergraduate TA in herpetology, first volunteered to help out in the Live Animal Lab out of personal interest, and she now uses it as a base for her research on sexual dimorphism in the color patterns of marbled salamanders.
"The old research said that females were this grayish yellow color with black spots and the males were this whitish blue color with black spots," Henderson said. "My research showed that while, yes, the females were a grayer color, the males were gray and white. Now my research is looking at why there's a difference in color, and I'm thinking it's either predation or sexual preference from the females of why they have the different colors because the bigger male salamanders were darker and they were with females."
The animals collected in the lab are returned to the exact place they were first collected, sometimes through GPS coordinates, in order to ease the transitions back to the wild.
The department's reputation for humane treatment and productive research has netted them some high-profile state-funded projects, like the Eastern indigo snake conservation project, now entering its fifth year.
"The Indigo Snake project was a project where the state came to us with the idea and we were excited to do it," said zoologist and Auburn professor Craig Guyer. "We collect and then release them into the Conecuh National Forest. We're trying to bring back that species in that habitat after they got wiped out by humans."
Indigo snakes, once exterminated as pests before being sold as pets, are starting to successfully return to the Southeast, partially due to the enthusiasm and activism of the students involved, Guyer said.
Guyer is currently involved with a joint research project with the entomology department to trace the origin of equine encephalitis.
Similar to West Nile, the neurological disease is spread between mammals and mosquitoes and can be fatal to humans.
"We know that birds are the main host for the disease, but birds' (immune systems) can get rid of it and we couldn't figure out how the birds still contracted it every year," Guyer said. "We think that birds get it and transmit it to mammals at the end of the year, then mosquitoes take it from the mammal to the snakes, snakes keep the disease here over winter and the mosquitoes that feed on both snakes and birds transmit it back to the bird population the next year."
The study found that water moccasins are a leading host species in the disease cycle, Guyer said, and a number of graduate students are already collecting DNA samples in the field.
Graduate biology student Melissa Miller spent the past few weekends collecting water moccasin samples from Montgomery to Miami.
"My dissertation research is aimed at examining how the Burmese Python in southern Florida has altered the pattern of parasite infection in native snakes," Miller said.
Miller said her research team made a discovery about pythons.
" We discovered that pythons have acquired a native lung parasite commonly found in our native pit vipers. If pythons are acting as a reservoir of that parasite, I expect the prevalence of the shared lung parasites should be higher in cottonmouths living near pythons compared to cottonmouths collected from locations separate from pythons."
The greater awareness of conservation has prompted cooperative efforts between construction companies and environmental groups, Guyer said.
Hopefully, Guyer said, in the future, animals will no longer need to be relocated, but can coexist with urban development.
"Rather than building in a way where those organisms have to live somewhere else, we're exploring designs where you would still have the same number of people, but have your parks and green spaces created in a way where the animals can still maintain themselves as well," Guyer said.
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