It’s the height of summer and temperatures in the New York City metro area are threatening triple digits. The campus of Stony Brook University appears deserted – the few remaining students likely hiding in air conditioning – and almost eerily quiet. Enter into Dana Hall, though, and the quiet dissipates as waves of laughter and joyful chatter cascade down the hallway.
Who is having so much fun in a dreary research building? How did they find themselves there? And what scientific insights emerged?
This is the story behind the paper “Novel species-level database of fish embryos and larvae in New York offshore waters, 2021-2023,” recently published in Scientific Data.
Who?
This paper resulted from years of fastidious data collection by a team of 14 undergraduate and high school students. Carefully, they sorted through plankton samples I had collected with a large net from waters off the coast of New York, isolating individual fish eggs and larvae (collectively referred to as ichthyoplankton). In total they separated 2,294 fish specimens from amidst billions of non-fish animals. Using DNA barcoding techniques, the students classified each individual to the species level.
These particular students were statistically unlikely to be working in my lab: 12 of the 14 identify as female and 11 as students of color. Across the United States, non-white individuals are greatly underrepresented in fisheries science, in both academic and federal government roles. So how did we defy these odds?
How?
When I designed my dissertation research, I purposefully incorporated plankton sorting and DNA barcoding. These techniques are hands-on, require no prior training, and are conducive to authentic scientific discovery — something I knew well from my decade-long work as co-founder of the science education and outreach non-profit BioBus.
Designing my research with a low barrier to entry was necessary but not sufficient: I needed to find students. To do that, and to specifically recruit students from minoritized backgrounds, I cultivated partnerships with a number of organizations: BioBus, NY Sea Grant, NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, the American Fisheries Society Hutton Scholars program, East Side Community School (part of NYC Public Schools), and Stony Brook University’s Simons STEM Scholars and WISE honors programs. Together with these organizational partners, I ensured that students were compensated for time spent on research activities; I also raised additional funds through National Science Foundation’s GEOPaths program.
Working with this diverse slate of institutional partners meant that I was not alone in supporting the students’ development as scientists. Instead, they were integrated into a larger network, which was intentional, as the creation of such STEM ecosystems is known to increase students’ persistence in STEM fields.
In line with this ecosystem metaphor, I have argued that in order to achieve equity in STEM, we need to move beyond notions of a ‘leaky STEM pipeline’ – and to consider instead how we can create ‘STEM burrows’. Burrows, as I imagine them, are small environments, at the scale of an individual lab, which are intentionally designed to nurture and support trainees from historically excluded backgrounds. Individually, a burrow only has local impact, but collectively, they can reshape the landscape of science itself.
In my time as a graduate student, I aimed to model the burrows approach. In addition to designing inclusive research and compensating students, I tried to make our lab a welcoming and supportive environment. I encouraged collaboration, mentorship, collegiality, and friendship between students; I wanted them to feel part of a community. The hallway-filling laughter was perhaps the best evidence of my success. (I also conducted pre- and post-surveys of students’ self-efficacy in marine and fisheries science, which quantitatively supported my conclusion that we had formed a productive and happy burrow.)
What emerged?
The data processed and collected by this team of students fed into one of the chapters of my dissertation, which is now in revision for publication. In that paper, I explored questions of how temperature preferences vary across different life cycle stages of a fish species. The answers to these questions have implications for fish populations, and for the humans that consume fish, as waters warm. Due to data limitations, my analyses focused only on five species, reflecting ~35% of the individuals we had identified.
But, we realized that the full dataset was rich, interesting, and held potential utility for answering many other research questions, beyond what I could tackle during my PhD. This is especially true of our data on fish embryos. Fish at that stage are extremely hard to differentiate visually and so species-level data is rare. I asked the students if they would be interested in writing a second paper, one which carefully described our dataset and ensured that it could be used by other researchers. One student, Sky Hadjiargyrou, volunteered to lead that effort.
The result is our paper “Novel species-level database of fish embryos and larvae in New York offshore waters, 2021-2023.” Sky is the lead author; of the eight other co-authors, six are undergraduates.
The dataset we present in this paper is novel. In it, we identified 50 unique species – one of which had not been known to inhabit the waters near New York. Of the 2,294 total animals we identified, 1,344 were in their embryonic stage. Because these embryos are so difficult to distinguish visually, our work nearly doubles the number of fish embryos that have been identified to the species level in this region.
Beyond these new identifications, the paper is novel because of who led it and how it happened – a real-life example of a STEM burrow.
In understanding more about the next generation of fish, we have also worked to cultivate a new generation of scientists. Our hope is that other researchers will think about how to develop their own burrows, so that the scientific community can evolve towards better reflecting the society it serves.