My walk down (undergraduate) memory lane culminates with a story about Moses*, the red-footed tortoise, to whom I dedicate this post.
In my previous post I mentioned a reptilian friend, and also alluded to some gender confusion. Moses was the beloved pet of one of the PhD students in the lab, AW, who was a great mentor to me. She initially thought that Moses was a boy. It became apparent that Moses was, in fact, a girl, only after I had completed my studies and left York. For the entire time that I was working with Moses, I had thought that he was a he, so it is still strange for me (even after all these years) to think of Moses as a girl. Therefore, for the purposes of this post, I shall continue to use the male pronoun.
So the animal lab (i.e. the Behavioural Neuroscience lab where I spent the summer of 2005) issued a call for final-year students interested in doing their dissertation with the lab. But for the life of me, I cannot quite remember whether that came before or after my summer stint with them. I think it came after. Anyway, I attended the meeting, of course, and there were a few topics that really appealed to me. Two were field observational in nature – observing greylag geese** (pictured below) in their natural habitat on the UoY campus, and observing chimpanzees (or was it gibbons) in an animal sanctuary that necessitated a bit of travel.
It might be a good idea at this point to lay out the thought process that led me to attending that meeting. It was kind of the same one that resulted in me having signed up for the summer internship with the animal lab. I was not actually thinking too far ahead, for instance wanting to pursue a career in animal research***. Rather, I think I was just doing something tangible with my lifelong fascination with animals. I liked being with animals, and I always spent ages observing them. And while it could be argued that I could have embarked on the path towards neuropsychology earlier if I had chosen instead to do a human cognition-related project, I believe I needed to get the animal bit out of the way and show myself that a love of animals does not mean I would enjoy building a career working with them. Everything happens as it is meant to, and there are no coincidences.
So clearly I didn’t take on either of the field observational projects and did not end up working with either greylag geese or chimps/gibbons. Instead, I took on a project that was born from a brainwave that AW had during the meeting. They were talking about rats being superb at learning mazes, and AW uttered the now famous words – “I bet Moses could do it too”. And that, my friends, was how I ended up with Moses the red-footed tortoise as my sole research subject.
I set about doing the necessary groundwork. From my literature review, I found that the first papers about cognition in chelonia (i.e. turtles, terrapins, tortoises) went back as far as more than a century ago (e.g. Yerkes, 1901). The big question we had was whether Moses, who does not have a hippocampus (important for some forms of spatial learning and cognition in mammals) by virtue of being a reptilian species, was able to conquer a maze in the lab. Successful performance in the maze, defined as performance that is better than chance level, would be proxy for ability to learn and remember spatial information.
I then went about designing an 8-arm radial maze based on those used with rats (pioneered by researchers Olton and Samuelson in the 1970s). I remember drawing up sketches of the radial arm maze (RAM) with my supervisor Professor GH, and then sending it to the technicians to be constructed. I had grossly overestimated Moses’s size, although I have no idea why as I had spent quite a bit of time with him by then. So I had mistakenly designed a very large holding space in the middle, as you can see from the image below. This is a picture I took of the actual RAM. It was placed on a table in a small-ish room, where I would spend hours on end sitting on a stool observing Moses traverse the RAM. On some days, there was no movement whatsoever when he wasn’t in the mood to do anything! We would bait the arms (this is experimental speak for placing or putting) with morsels of strawberry, which AW said was Moses’s favourite fruit. In the early days, there was a lot of trial and error in response to Moses’s behaviour in the experimental room. For instance, AW altered her feeding regiment so that Moses wouldn’t be too filled up in the morning when I began the experiment and would thus be more motivated to explore the RAM for the bits of treats waiting for him at the end of each arm.
It was a fun 6-7 months, but there were moments of doubt about whether this was going to pan out and if it was even a legit research project to begin with. There was a lot of downtime, with Moses splayed motionless in the RAM looking mildly amused and me sat on my stool bored to tears. I would entreat him to budge, to get to the yummy strawberry bites, to do SOMETHING. But when he did get his mojo on – boy could the tortoise move, one tiny tubby leg after another. He was a champ. In the end he did perform greater than chance and I was able to write up a marvellous dissertation based on my findings****.
Moses ended up doing way more than conquering this 8-arm radial maze that I designed. He would go on to be the star of many more research studies, with AW dazzling the research world with all sorts of interesting findings from her very own reptilian research lab. But coming back to me, Moses saved my entire undergraduate career – my dissertation was graded 80%. In my earlier post I had said that the final year research project was worth a hefty 60 credits (i.e. half of the total 120 credits per academic year), and mainly because of that I got over the line and was awarded a First Class Honours overall (though I did perform pretty well in some of the third year subjects after deciding to buck up). And of course, this went on to open up many doors for me, because try as we may to move away from grades-based evaluation, no one can deny the importance of academic pedigree and performance, especially if one wants to study neuropsychology.
So anyway, enjoy this picture I took of Moses and I fist-bumping when I went back to visit in September 2007 (I graduated in July 2006). You’re welcome.
Actually, there was another feather in Moses’s and my cap. The external examiners of my dissertation “absolutely loved” (in the words of my co-supervisor and mentor Dr KK) the project and recommended to the board of examiners in UoY to nominate it for the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) Best Undergraduate Project Prize and the British Psychological Society (BPS) Psychobiology Prize. We ended up winning the EPS award, which was a great honour for myself and the animal lab of course.
As part of the award acceptance, I was invited to present my work at the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) festival in September 2007. As luck would have it, it was held in York on the UoY campus that year. So back to York I went, all expenses paid for, with my dad in tow this time. He took the picture below of me presenting my final slide (I remember feeling such relief that the presentation was about to be over – I had really bad stage fright back then!). That was also when I went back to see Moses and everyone in the lab. Things really did come full circle.
Two weeks later I was in London for my Masters studies. In my next post, I will talk about the time between graduating from York and deciding on London, and what I got up to during this period.
*Moses is seen in the feature picture with a slice of honey dew. He had a love of all kinds of tropical fruit, which were harder to come by in cold wintry York and hence pretty pricey. He also liked mangoes. He was an exotic tortoise indeed. I can’t remember whether I took this photo, or whether it was one sent to me by Moses’s human. He looks humongous here but he was actually fun-sized back then!
**In one of my previous posts I mentioned the greylag geese, but I don’t think I painted an adequate picture of their ubiquity. They were literally EVERYWHERE on campus, and walked around like they owned the place. During the summer of my internship, I became friends with a community cat who would come by my room every evening to eat the tuna I got her and spend the night. When the new academic term started, I had to move back to my old halls, which was by the lake on the main campus. I remember not being able to bring her (the cat) along with me out of fear that she would get pecked to smithereens by the greylag geese! It may not be very apparent, but these geese can (and do) grow to become quite large. They could be rather ferocious when they wanted, and when they felt threatened they would unfurl the span of their large wings and stretch their body upwards with a warning honk. It was always a marvelous sight! I’ve had friends get chased by these geese, which could not have been all that marvelous I suppose.
***In fact, I don’t think I had a very clear idea what I wanted to do after York. This is what I wrote in an email to a professor in July 2006, after graduating with my BSc (Hons) – “My long-term plan is to further my studies in the area of study which interests me most.”. Vague, at best!
****In fact we put up a manuscript to be published in a journal, and it was accepted. Email me if you’re interested in reading the paper.