Every fall, when a chill falls over New York and most Fordham students don oversized sweatshirts and hide under blankets for a little extra warmth, Craig L. Frank, biology professor at Fordham College at Rose Hill, begins his research outdoors at the Louis Calder Center in Armonk, NY.
The Calder Center, a 113-acre biological field station, lends itself to hands-on biological research. Since 2000, Frank has been observing the adaptation of small mammals, particularly chipmunks, to cold winters.
"I've done work with chipmunks, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, kangaroo rats, and tree squirrels to address general questions about the different strategies that animals use to survive winters and to what extent natural selection favors one manner over the other," Frank said. "Basically, small animals either store food and don't hibernate, hibernate and don't store food, or, in the case of chipmunks, they do both. Chipmunks are the only animal within the squirrel family to have that combined strategy."
When these animals hibernate, or to use more scientifically accurate terminology, go into torpor, they enter a condition of metabolic depression.
"When animals exist in their normal state, their body temperature will be about 36 degree centigrade," Frank said. "When they go into torpor, their body temperature becomes that of their surroundings. Their heart rates drop, their respiration rates drop, and their metabolic rates drop to less than 10 percent of regular levels, so they only need about 10 percent of the energy required otherwise."
Frank received three grants from the National Science Foundation and two from the USDA Forest Service to develop a Radio Telemetry system.
"It's just like a TV where you put little radio collars on a small animals and just let them go," Frank said. "It's very difficult to do this on smaller animals because you can shrink the collar, but then the battery life is so minimal. My job was to come up with a system where we could follow automatic signals from a very small animal throughout a nine-month season."
2008 Woodie Awards
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