USM Alumna’s Wasp Research Accepted for Publication in Prestigious Journal

Fri, 10/20/2023 - 09:41am | By: Van Arnold

One research project led to another unexpected discovery for University of Southern Mississippi alumna Alycia Johnson, who is the first author of a natural history paper that has been accepted by the journal - “Caribbean Naturalist.”

Two summers ago, Johnson served as a research assistant for USM doctoral student Clayton Ziemke, who was studying the effects of hurricanes on ant diversity in the Luquillo Experimental Forest of Puerto Rico. During that period, Johnson noticed that a poorly known species of social paper wasp (Mischocyttarus phthisicus) was particularly common in the area.

Intrigued by the discovery, she collected initial information about where the species nests, the size of the colonies and what type of nest architecture they produced. Johnson also found evidence that wasps from slightly higher elevations can tolerate less heat than ones from lower elevations in Puerto Rico, even across relatively little change in elevation. From those observations and data collection, a research paper was born.

“This is my first-ever accepted paper, and I am very excited to see it finalized,” said Johnson, wo earned her undergraduate degree in biology from USM earlier this year. “It has not been published yet, but it should be soon. I also extremely grateful to all of my co-authors who made this paper possible.”

Johnson is currently a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester. She added: “My work with Mischocyttarus phthisicus was brief and hopefully just the beginning. This paper really only laid down the basics of this wasp, including its occurrence in the Caribbean, average colony size and nesting biology. We also did some preliminary looks at their thermal tolerance across an elevation gradient and found results contradict Brett’s Rule, a well-known theory stating that cold tolerance will vary more than heat tolerance across a geographic cline.”

A native of Ocean Springs, Miss., Johnson says her interest in nature and animals took root at an early age. However, it wasn’t until her junior year at USM that she became enamored with insects after taking a course in entomology. From there, her interests narrowed to social wasps after joining the lab of USM Assistant Professor of biology Dr. Kaitlin Baudier.

Baudier lauds Johnson’s research efforts and work ethic as “top-notch.

“Any time something needed doing in the lab, she jumped in to help,” said Baudier. “She is creative, and a great problem-solver. As a result, it's hard to think of a project going on in our group that she wasn't a part of. Alycia is a fantastic up-and-coming researcher. I can't wait to see what she goes on to do from here.”

Baudier further emphasized that in their field, producing a first author research paper as an undergraduate student represents an impressive achievement.

Ziemke points out that he and Johnson hiked many times to 12 experimental forest plots in the rainy regions of the Loquillo mountains, setting food baits on leaf litter and in trees, while collecting ants that were active in each plot. They also surveyed stands of Heliconia and montane palm, splitting every dead leaf, hollow stem, and rotting log to count ant nests.

“She quickly learned to distinguish the most common ant species and was an extremely diligent data collector,” said Ziemke. “She assisted in lab experiments to measure thermal tolerance for ants, a method she used for wasps in her independent project. She did all of the data analysis, much of the writing, and an entire poster based on this work. I am extremely proud of her and excited to see her apply her skillset and curiosity to a doctoral project.”