A Natural History of Vertebrates

Spring, 2013

A Naural History of Vertebrates

I looked on in disbelief. In the front of the class, one of my classmates was holding a completely flattened squirrel by its tail. From the looks of it, it had been completely squashed by a large truck, possibly even an 18-wheeler. I took a quick look around to survey my classmates. Everyone else seemed quite awestruck too, but somehow no one had the audacity to bring it to the professor’s attention that this was an insane thing for someone to be doing. It was the second day of my first upper-level biology class at Dickinson College, a class called A Natural History of Vertebrates. I didn’t know it then, but the class was going to get a lot weirder from there.

The premise of undergraduate classes is usually pretty simple. You generally are graded on some combination of a few tests, quizzes, homework, and an occasional presentation. Usually there is no requirement to collect roadkill and turn it into taxidermy. A Natural History of Vertebrates was the rare exception. Consulting the syllabus would show you that somewhere close to 50% of your grade for the class would be determined by an evaluation of the 3 “study skins” you prepared. An amphibian, bird, and mammal were the requirements. Apparently, birds were hard to get, so in lieu of a bird you could prepare another mammal instead. The real kicker was explained to us when a student asked where we were supposed to obtain these specimens from. “There is a lot of roadkill in Carlisle, PA” our professor explained, “Especially in the warmer months”. And there it was, the primary goal of this class was to convert roadkill into taxidermy.

The Humble Frog

I had been in the class for a couple months and my prospects were looking slim. Between my other course work, running for the cross-country team, and the general desire do anything other than picking up roadkill, I had not yet found any suitable specimens. I had started to devise a winning strategy though. My plan was to make it into a team activity. I figured if I could convince a few of my buddies to come with me, it might make for a better time than going about it all alone. A strange request to be sure, but what are friends for if not this? Me and two of my good friends, Conor and Nick, loaded up the car one night and headed out to the far side of the mountain. It was early spring, and it had just rained. It turned out that meant I was in luck- an unbelievable number of frogs were out, covering the road trying to find their way to the vernal ponds.

When is the last time you saw an amphibian on the side of the road? For those of you who have never thought about it they tend to be soft and don’t hold up well to being struck by an automobile. After getting out of the car a couple times and looking at pancake shaped frogs it was clear that I was going to have to improvise. I got out of the car, picked a frog up off the side of the road, and put it into a plastic bag that was lying on the floor of my car. I would have to figure out what to do with this thing later. On the way home, I learned my first lessons from the course: gas stations in rural Pennsylvania are not open 24/7. It was 2:00 AM, and I had such little gas that I was shifting into neutral when going down hills. After a very intense ride, we rolled back to the dorms. It was close but we had made it.

So now the question was what to do with the frog? It was more alive than I had hoped for when starting our little expedition. There were only two options. I could either kill the frog or let it go. The economics of killing a frog for a grade. It ended up being relatively straight forward calculus. After all, my entire life I was taught that it was good to get good grades. Perhaps this was just what biologists did- I didn’t know any better. Besides, if I let the frog go, I was just going to have to find another one later down the road. It had taken a non-insignificant amount of luck and work to get this one and I was still pretty sure there was no possible way I would happen across an already dead amphibian. It was decided- I would do what I had to do.

The next question was- how do you kill a frog? I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of doing this and I certainly didn’t want it to suffer. I was a bit squeamish, so using a knife or something was out of the question. It seemed that the cleanest way would be to suffocate the frog. But how to do that? My solution was nothing but novel. Still wrapped in the plastic bag, I placed the frog in a water bottle that was lying around on the floor. To be fair this didn’t accomplish much other than putting the frog in sturdier vesicle. Then the real innovation came. I brought my lips to the water bottle and sucked out all the air. Despite the morbid nature of what I was doing I couldn’t help but be a little proud of my cleverness. I looked at my work. It was essentially a crumpled water bottle. Perhaps this wasn’t all that clever after all. For good measure, I put the killing contraption in the freezer of our mini fridge. Over the next couple of hours, my roommates and I were treated to an eclectic spattering of frog croaks. Eventually, around 2:00 in the morning, there was silence. I took that to mean that my engineering had succeeded- I could deal with the rest in the morning.

Where do all the frogs go in the winter? If I had known the answer to that question, I might have done things differently. It turns out that frogs can hibernate -when the temperature gets below a certain threshold, they can drastically slow their metabolism reducing their requirement for oxygen. In fact, they can even freeze due to the high concentration of glucose in the frog's vital organs that prevents damage that would normally be caused by the accumulation of ice crystals. All this meant that my decision to put the thing in the freezer had effectively saved the frog. This became all too apparent after I removed the frog from the contraption and the frog miraculously returned to life and started hoping away. This frog had gone through more than enough. I couldn’t bring myself to make another attempt on its life. I released it back in to the wild.

For all my effort, I was 0/3. What a rollercoaster. Thankfully I had a backup plan for getting another amphibian. It involved some gaiters that I had seen in the basement of our biology building, a fishing net, and the cover of night. One Friday night I convinced a group of my friends to forfeit our normal activities and accompany me to the letort spring run. Before long I was in the middle of the river, surrounded by a chorus of the characteristic peeps of Pseudacris crucifer also known as the spring peeper. Before too long, I caught one with the net. It was a cool looking frog. It was in the Hylidae, or tree frog family, so it had the toe pads characteristic of the tree frogs you see in photos from the amazon. Super cool stuff. Now all I had to do was get out of the river. One would imagine this would be an easy task, but I was finding out that nothing related to this class ever was simple. The bottom of the river was full of loose sediment that was effectively acting as quicksand. The more I moved, the deeper I sunk. I couldn’t help but consider my situation. There I was, in the middle of a freezing cold river, in the middle of the night, holding a frog in one hand, a net in the other, all while sinking deeper and deeper. It was humorous, although it would have been funnier if it would have been happening to someone else. The water had already begun to come over the top of the gaiters. I called out, hoping my friends would be able to help me out. They came as close as they could, trying to help from the shoreline. Unfortunately, the river was quite wide, and they were two far away to be of much assistance. I was on my own here. Eventually I opted for a brute force strategy. Now completely soaked, I half swam, half walked to the shoreline. I had the frog, now it was time to bring it back to the lab. I didn’t bother with any sort of intricate killing contraption this time, instead I opted for a simpler method. I prepared a solution of formaldehyde and dropped the frog in. Before long the frog became still and I had 1/3 study skins. I didn’t feel great about the method of obtaining it, but I was willing to take it as a win.

The Quelled Mammal

On Groundhog Day in 2012, Punxsutawney Phil must have been very startled by his shadow- gone back into his hole declaring that there would be much more winter to come. One of the things most people are blissfully unaware of is how little roadkill there is when it is cold outside. Unfortunately, I now knew this to be the case. Despite taking several excursions in my 1994 Corolla to scout out specimens, after each trip I had returned to campus empty handed. My friend and classmate John was in a similar boat as me- he still needed a mammal for a study skin. Unlike me, he had a pretty good plan to get one and was gracious enough to take me with him. For a reason that I don’t quite remember, he knew of a place where someone had placed some plywood sheets in an open field. The plan was to go lift these plywood sheets and catch any rodents that might be unlucky enough to be using it as shelter. The plan worked like a charm. We both caught a field mouse otherwise known as a Apodemus sylvaticus specimen with relative ease. Now we were at what had come to be a reoccurring problem in my life as of late. Our specimens were alive, and we needed them to be dead. But how to do it? This time we had two brains to come up with an idea. Our arrived upon solution seemed to be clean and elegant considering the situation. We figured that we could just use carbon monoxide as a relative peaceful method to take down the mice. John turned on his car, and I held the mouse’s face to the exhaust pipe. How long was this going to take? It had been a couple of minutes and so far, the mouse looked a bit confused but very much alive. I kept it going. 10, 15, 20 minutes- it didn’t matter- the mouse was still fine. John suggested that we take a different approach.

John’s proposed method was less appealing. He was adamant that a well-placed karate chop between the vertebrae would quickly and painlessly kill the mouse. He grabbed his mouse and I watched as he hit it with a well-placed chop. It worked surprisingly well. I waited for John to dispatch the second mouse. Now- John was several years older than I was. At the time I was 19, while he was well into his mid-twenties; having taken a less direct path to undergrad. I had just assumed that was going to deal with my mouse for me. After all, he had just proven to be quite effective at that. He made it clear that wasn’t how this was going to work- it was now my turn. Shakily and hesitantly, my hand came down, but it was not nearly as well executed as Johns had been. This was no fatal blow. The mouse was fucked, but it wasn’t dead yet. I tried to compensate for the lack of quality of my blow with quantity. I wanted to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible and that seemed the best I could do under the circumstances. In the end, I guess it worked. 2/3. One to go.

The Ellusive Bird

It was the beginning of May, the semester was about to end and I had two weeks left to find my last study skin. I was getting desperate. I took a quick look at the weather forecast. It looked like it would be perfect weather for roadkill that weekend. With any luck I would be able to get the final study skin I needed on Saturday.

There was the unmistakable sound of tires screeching as I looked out of the driver side window of my car to see another car barreling towards me. The car was close now, it wasn’t going to be able to stop in time. I instinctively braced myself and milliseconds later the car made impact. Suddenly time slowed to a halt. My car started spinning around in a circle, propelled by the force of the other car. I remember the moment vividly. I wasn’t scared, rather I felt as though I was standing outside of my body, watching the scene unfold from the third person. After what felt like an eternity, friction overcame the force of the impact, and my car shuttered to a halt. I was shaken but seemed to be okay. The first thing I remember thinking was how am I going to explain this when the police show up?

The trunk of my car smelled terrible. So much so that I felt as though I owed the police officers that had arrived at the scene an explanation. I didn’t want them to think that I had a human corpse in there. As soon as I heard my explanation leave my mouth, I regretted it. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but whatever it was certainly sounded insane. There is no neat way of explaining to the police that you had picked up a dead raccoon to make into taxidermy for your roadkill class, been so disgusted by it that you were frantically driving around looking for anything else, were so distracted by the situation that you didn’t look both ways at the intersection, and then got T-boned on the driver side by a brand new car that had driven off of the lot just minutes prior. Based on the looks on their faces they didn’t know what to make of me or my story. I assured them that Dickinson College was a real college and eventually they must have decided that it was easiest to just ignore the details, let me go, and call a tow truck. Somehow, in the process of doing this no one offered me a ride and there I was, on the far side of the mountain, a long way from Dickinson, all by myself. Thankfully I had cell service, and I ended up calling one of the few upperclassmen on my cross-country team that had a car to come pick me up. 45 min or so later, a group of my older teammates showed up to drive me back to campus. They didn’t quite know what to make of my story either.

As soon as I got back to my dorm, I called my mom. I needed help. I had no idea what to do in this situation. To be fair neither did she, but she came anyway. We figured the first thing we needed to do was find my car and collect my personal effects. We eventually tracked my car down to a junk yard that was a couple miles away from the site of the accident. When we got there, after a quick chat with the manager, it was apparent that the most cost-effective option for us was going to just be to leave the car as it lay. The manager offered to walk us out to the car. As we neared the car it began to reek. The already disgusting raccoon had been sitting in the trunk of the car in the hot sun all day, which as you could imagine made it 10 times worse. Having retold the story several times at this point, I recited it once more to explain the overwhelming smell. Despite all my practice, the story still elicited a “what is wrong with you” type of response. I collected all of my things, took the trash bag with the racoon out of the trunk of my car, and threw it deep into the woods. All this and I still only had 1/3 of my study skins.

I sat in the passenger seat of my mom’s minivan on the ride back to my dorm. I was upset about losing my car, I didn’t have the money to get a new one anytime soon. It was also not lost on me that it was going to be much harder than it already was to source roadkill without a mode of transportation. After all that had happened, I still had not given up- I was still worried about passing the class. I looked ahead to see a miracle. Perhaps I was going to get a study skin right here and now. Up ahead there was a turkey gobbling away in the middle of the road. There was little time to think -this was an opportunity that was not to be wasted. “Mom- you have to hit it!” I exclaimed. If there is a limit as to what a mother will do for their child, this wasn’t it. Even though she was clearly panicked, the van was headed right into the path of the turkey. I held my breath- we were going to get it. Then I was shocked to see the turkey start to rise through the air. Up until this point in my life, I had no idea that those things were capable of flight. I tilted my head up, tracking it through the air, seeing it narrowly clear the top of the car. “I’m sorry Charlie, I really did try” my mom said.

In the end, one of my classmates took pity on me and gave me an extra dead squirrel that they had in the freezer for some reason. That put me over the finish line- I was now 3/3. I had accomplished each of the insane tasks that A Natural History of Vertebrates had demanded of me. All it had taken was a totaled car, the lives of several innocent animals, and the support of my friends and family. For my herculean efforts, I was rewarded with an A-.