Laboratory Members
Craig in fishroom
Craig Swindells, Undergraduate 09'
interests: I started working in the Foster/Baker lab my first year after Susan told my Introductory Biology class that there was room in her lab for students. I figured that it was a great opportunity to start my research at Clark University early, especially since I hadn’t really developed a sense of what I wanted out of college, and I was right. My main duty in the laboratory for the past four years has been fish room maintenance, which basically means I help take care of the thousands of fish we have in our fish room. This requires me to do anything from feeding the fish to cleaning and fixing tanks. I have yet to travel to Alaska with the field team, but while the team is up in Alaska during the summer I get paid to raise the eggs that return from the field and make sure they survive the transformation from egg into adult.
Stained fish - photograph by Anna Mazzarella.
While I have mostly spent my time raising and maintaining the fish, I have also dabbled in various research projects in the lab. I have helped collect, count and measure eggs from preserved specimens, as well as helping with several behavioral studies that looked at the anti-predator behavior of the stickleback. Classes that I have taken at Clark, such as Animal Behavior, have required me to create simple experiments. Right now I am working on a project with Drs. Matt Wund and John Baker that looks at the relationship between the armoring on the fish and how that fish behaves. The basic hypothesis of the experiment is that the more armor a fish has (longer spines, more lateral plates, etc.) the less anti-predator behavior we expect to see from that particular fish. Some of the populations that we are looking at have lost their armor over time so it will be interesting to see how their behavior has changed, if at all, with that loss in armor.
Outside the laboratory: I spend most of my time with the friends that I have found at Clark, though I do participate in several extracurricular activities. For example I’m a member of Clark’s Ultimate Frisbee team, which is a club team that participates in tournaments across New England. I also am a member of S.P.O.C. (Science-fiction People of Clark), which is for those of you interested in anything from video games to Dungeon’s and Dragon’s. I also enjoy hiking and reading whenever I get the chance.
Send Craig an email at cswindells@clarku.edu