In addition to some 1800 students, Bowdoin’s campus is also home to a community of goldfish, crickets and lobsters, courtesy of the Neuroscience Program. Though the animals—which reside in Druckenmiller Hall and Kanbar Hall—play a quiet role on campus, they provide unique research opportunities to neuroscience professors and students.
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Rick Thompson, the director of the Neuroscience Program, explained that professors select the animals partially because of their specific research objectives. Several years ago rats were tested in Kanbar’s basement labs, but they have since been removed.
“Every researcher has a particular question they want to ask,” he said. “And that determines, to some extent, the species they’re going to use.”
For example, Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Hadley Horch researches the regeneration of nervous tissue using crickets, creatures that possess remarkable regenerative properties.
“Even for an invertebrate, the cricket auditory system is very good at recovering from injury,” she said. “If you cut off the leg, parts of the cell actually grow across the midline, which is basically a boundary they typically respect. They get information functionally from the opposite ear.”
Thompson, on the other hand, researches the behavioral effects of specific chemicals. For him, goldfish were a logical choice.
“Goldfish have a very well characterized pheromone communication system—olfactory communication,” he said. “We know some of the exact molecules they use to say different things to one another. That allows me to go in and ask how different chemicals, such as steroid hormones, affect the way their social signals are processed.”
There are other considerations in choosing lab animals as well. These tend to arise from constraints on the laboratory space and infrastructure available to the Neuroscience Program.
In Cleveland Hall and the basement of Kanbar, research proceeds under the guidance of Marko Melendy, Bowdoin’s animal care supervisor, under whose management research infrastructure has expanded.
Animal care involves parameters set by a variety of scientific, ethical and governmental standards.
Thompson said that great care is taken to ensure humane conditions for the animals used in research. He said goldfish are relatively easy to maintain: Thompson houses them in groups like they would be found naturally.
The goldfish swim in schools in large tanks in the quiet of Kanbar’s basement. In a room nearby, two tanks are set up in front of a camera in order to monitor goldfish behavior under the influence of various chemicals. Another tank is set up to carry out experiments under different light settings.
Another important consideration in selecting animals is the ease with which research can be conducted once the animals are acquired. In some research, species that have already been extensively studied are used. For other projects—including most of those run by the Neuroscience Program—animals are selected based on their evolutionary capabilities.
“There are two strategies,” Horch explained. “One is to select what we call a model organism: fruit flies, these little worms called C. elegans, and mice, and zebra fish—which we have excellent genetic control over. You can ask all sorts of amazing questions. The problem from an evolutionary point of view is that those are only four systems, and the animal kingdom is vast. Many of us think there’s a real advantage to using other organisms.”
At the same time, even unusual research animals can be accessible for other reasons.
“We can get to [goldfish’s] brains easily,” said Thompson. “It’s much easier to look inside their brains and see how things are working than, say, a human.”
Horch said she has found a surprising way to make individual neurons visible under the microscope.
“We do some backfills of individual cells,” she said. “We put in dye and try to fill some number of individual cells.”
If crickets were more heavily studied organisms with more known about their biology, Horch said that she could simply modify a particular cricket’s genetic information so that certain neurons would turn neon colors.
Beyond the lack of genetic sequencing, Thompson noted potential problems with using larger mammals.
“We’re still only a mid- to small-sized program,” he said. “Once you go to mammals, things become even more complicated. Most of the people here are using simpler systems.”
Horch, who used ferrets in her postdoctoral research, agreed, noting that it is important to find an animal that undergraduates feel comfortable researching and—since it is sometimes necessary—killing.
“When you go to a larger university,” she said. “It’s many more vertebrates, like mice and rats and that kind of stuff.”