February 5, 2009: Volume 75, Number 5

Student jumps at the chance for this job

If you happen to be in the Science & Engineering Building at just the right time each morning, you might see a young woman carrying a huge (and overflowing) bowl of leafy greens.

“It's what I'm known as – ‘the lettuce girl,’” said Jen Granina ’11.

The supersize salad isn’t for her, though; it’s for the dozens of large, ravenous grasshoppers she feeds almost daily as part of her work-study job.

Measuring two or three inches long, the greenish-brown arthropods from the Southeastern U.S. are giants – at least compared to the typical grasshoppers found around here. Granina estimates that these hungry hoppers, which live in cages in Butterfield Hall, devour about nine heads of lettuce each day.

Keeping the insects well-fed is important to ongoing Union research.

“My students and I examine questions relating to developmental physiology,” said Scott Kirkton, assistant professor of biology. “We’re interested in how changes during growth affect oxygen delivery and muscle physiology.”

 

More specifically, Kirkton and two senior thesis students are investigating a change in oxygen usage that seems to occur as these animals age.

“The grasshopper jumping muscle is the only insect muscle known to produce lactic acid during activity, which is similar to our sprinting muscle,” Kirkton explained. “However, the smallest juveniles don’t produce lactic acid during jumping, so it appears the muscle undergoes a developmental shift from aerobic to anaerobic.

“We are trying to ascertain the cause for this switch.”

The grasshoppers, called American locusts (Schistocerca americana), are also used in a lab for Biology 101, in which students compare their own jumping performance to that of the leaping insects.

While Granina only feeds the grasshoppers and doesn’t participate in the research, she’s still happy to be “lettuce girl.”

“I’m double-majoring in biology and French. This allows me to get to know a lot about the Biology Department, and that’s going to help in terms of looking for professors to do research with.

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