Each year, Colgate University seniors undertake what is probably the most daunting task of their undergraduate schooling: the senior thesis. Every thesis is unique, shaped by the passions and curiosities of each student, each leading to a different journey. For senior Emilia Bennett, this journey led her to the Mara River which flows through both Kenya and Tanzania, where she studied the ecological role of hippos by researching their dung and the invertebrates that rely on them.
But what led Bennett to the path of ecology? It comes as no surprise that she has always had an affinity for the outdoors ever since she was young.
“I grew up on Lake Ontario, so I was always around the water. My parents were very outdoorsy; I was canoeing a lot [and] I was fishing a lot,” Bennett shared.
These hobbies would eventually lead her to undertake a major in marine and freshwater biology, though the full major title is much lengthier: natural sciences with a concentration in marine science — freshwater science.
“As I got older and I was thinking about different career paths, my aunt was like, ‘you have to think about whether or not you want to be inside or outside.’ And I always thought okay, maybe I’ll be an artist or a musician or an interior designer or something, and then I was like wait, all of those things are indoors,” Bennett explained.
Her grandmother, who lives in the town of Hamilton, encouraged her to apply to Colgate. While being in upstate New York without much access to the water, Bennett affirmed that Colgate still supported her in her academic endeavors.
“I feel like because I’m doing so much data analysis this semester, it’s going to make me better at field work because I’m going to think, ‘What are the possible questions that people would want to answer? [What] data am I going to need to answer those questions?’ You can be a lot more thorough and rigorous with your data collection if you have experience with analysis,” Bennett said.
Her thesis topic involved working closely with Assistant Professor of Biology Therese Frauendorf. Together, they sought to figure out what exactly in hippo dung helps the invertebrates in the river thrive.
“The actual experiment itself is about what aspect of hippo dung the invertebrates are relying on. Hippo dung has a lot of structure and grass still preserved in it, because hippos don’t have a very complex digestive system,” Bennett said. “So they eat grass on land, and then when they go into the river and defecate, it’s still that grass-like structure, but it’s also really nutrient-rich because it’s dung. […] There’s some structural component and we wanted to see if it’s the nutrients or the structure the invertebrates are using.”
To conduct the experiment, Bennett used rather unconventional techniques to process the hippo dung, involving blending and boiling it.
“To test that, we blended some in a blender to remove the structural component completely, so it’s just nutrients. We boiled some so that it was just the structural components and no nutrients and then we had some raw, unprocessed, hippo dung,” Bennett elaborated.
It turns out Bennett’s hypothesis was right. The unaltered hippo dung had the greatest impact on the invertebrates. Bennett was proud to find significant results during her senior thesis research and explained that this isn’t a common experience.
“A lot of people didn’t find a correlation between what they were studying and what they were thinking could happen,” Bennett said.
While Bennett has already tested her work with R-squared values, and there does seem to be a correlation, she is currently in the process of finishing her thesis and doing further statistical analysis and testing to confirm her results. When asked about post-Colgate plans, Bennett revealed that she has a job lined up that starts just three days after graduation. She will be pursuing humpback whale research with the College of the Atlantic and Allied Whale.
