Tag Archive for: Young scientists research experience

Young Scientists Research Experience 2026

Our Young Scientists Research Experience is one of our favorite programs of the year! Middle and high school students spend a week with us doing their own independent research projects. They come up with a research question, collect data to answer their questions, and share their findings during a presentation to friends and family.

We’re incredibly proud of the work these students did, and we’re excited to share their results with you!

If you’d like to sign up for next year’s Young Scientist Research Experience, you can subscribe to our email newsletter to be notified when registration opens.

Here’s a quick summary of all their hard work:

On our morning walk, we did some bug-catching and when Kieran remembered that Sassafras have three different leaf shapes he wondered if there was one that insects do or don’t prefer. Kieran went on the hunt for Sassafras trees and recorded how much leaf damage there was on different shaped leaves, as well as their color and softness. He also included oval-shaped Spicebush leaves in his study as a control since they are in the same family as Sassafras. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found the least leaf damage on fresh soft leaves, but what was a bit surprising is that there was the least leaf damage on the Sassafras leaves that look like dinosaur footprints (or ghosts, depending on who you ask). Why that is is a subject for further research!

Kieran (right) studied the shapes of Sassafras leaves.

We have been wondering what kinds of trees Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers prefer for years, so we were thrilled when Kiran decided to figure it out for himself. Kiran spent the week looking for trees with sapsucker holes (usually a horizontal line of evenly spaced holes) and recording the species of tree, as well as how many holes and where on the tree they were. He found lots of tulip trees and hickories with sapsucker holes, but since these are some of the most abundant trees in our woods the woodpeckers might just be using what’s available. What was somewhat surprising was how few oaks he found with sapsucker holes. Maybe the wood is too hard? Kiran also found that the sapsucker holes were more likely to be at the tops of trees than the bottom. Now we’re curious why they like being up high!

Kiran studied Yellow-bellied Sapsucker tree preferences.

Luke came back for his second year of Young Scientists and switched his focus from birds to vines. Luke noticed that all the vines he was seeing seemed to be growing in the same direction and at about the same angle and wondered if this trend would hold up to further inquiry. He studied Oriental Bittersweet and Japanese Honeysuckle and recorded the angle at which the vines grew relative to their tree hosts. His most astonishing discovery was that all the Oriental Bittersweet he found were growing counterclockwise (up to the right) and all the Japanese Honeysuckle he found were growing clockwise (up to the left). This is apparently known in the scientific literature but it’s not something our staff had ever noticed before! Luke also found that bittersweet grew at a different angle on larger trees whereas honeysuckle grew at about the same angle regardless of the size of the tree. It’s always exciting for us to discover something new about incredibly common species we don’t usually take the time to look at closely.

Luke studied vines.

One thing our fields is full of is young tulip trees and that gave Owen a chance to look at an awful lot of tulip leaves. On the first day Owen noticed lots of variation, some big leaves, some tiny leaves, some with deep lobes (indentations), some with barely any lobes at all. All of which led him to wonder, does the sinus depth of a Tulip Poplar leaf depend on how high it is on a tree? in a presentation he brilliantly named “The Highness of the Sinus: Measuring Tulip Poplar Sinuses.” There wasn’t a strong pattern, which is interesting in and of itself, but to the extent he found a relationship it was the middle-height leaves that were largest and had the deepest sinuses. Owen expected there to be a linear relationship one way or the other between leaf height and sinus depth, so he felt that his finding might not be corroborated by more data. There’s always next year!

Owen studied Tulip Poplar leaves.

Audrey was captivated by the bright orange Butterfly Milkweed that was blooming in June and wondered if it was its color that attracted so many pollinators or some other factor. Audrey spent the week meticulously counting the numbers of different kinds of insects visiting different color and shape flowers and found that there were the most insects of orange, red, and pink flowers. Since many of the orange and pink flowers were milkweeds, she directly compared orange Day Lilies to orange Butterfly Milkweed and found more insects on the Butterfly Milkweed, suggesting that it has more to do with the milkweed’s shape, smell, or abundant nectar. Audrey also set up an experiment with different colored pan traps and found that orange and pink were popular colors there, too. Audrey hopes to come back next year to figure out once and for all what attracts insects to flowers. 

Alistair returned for a third year of Young Scientists and a third project studying what kinds of microhabitats arthropods prefer. After studying whether spiders prefer fields or forests and what shape leaves Spotted Lanternflies like to land on, this year Alistair compared the bug community living under rocks and logs. Alistair found more total arthropods under rocks but more types of arthropods under logs. He wondered if this might be because rocks provided cooling shelter in summer heat and wants to try the same experiment at different times of year.

Alistair studied arthropods.

It took just one encounter on our morning walk for Ellie to fall in love with jumping spiders and she dedicated her week to figuring out where they like to live. Over the course of 100 sweep net samples she got very good at swishing the heavy net through thick vegetation and was recognized at the end of the week for the care with which she returned each and every bug to where she had found it. Despite it being easier to move the net through mowed vegetation, she found many more jumping spiders, as well as other insects, in unmowed vegetation. Ellie wants to be a zoologist when she grows up and we hope her experience with some of our smallest animals helped her on that path.

Ellie studied jumping spiders.

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Young Scientists Research Experience 2025

Our Young Scientists Research Experience is one of our favorite programs of the year! Middle and high school students spend a week with us doing their own independent research projects. They come up with a research question, collect data to answer their questions, and share their findings during a presentation to friends and family.

We’re incredibly proud of the work these students did, and we’re excited to share their results with you!

If you’d like to sign up for next year’s Young Scientist Research Experience, you can subscribe to our email newsletter to be notified when registration opens.

Here’s a quick summary of all their hard work:

After noticing the many Spotted Lanternflies at Clifton this summer, Alistair, a second time Young Scientist, wondered if there are certain types of plants they prefer over others. Since Spotted Lanternflies are known to use Tree of Heaven and Tree of Heaven has compound leaves, Alistair decided to compare plants with compound and simple leaves to see if the insects might be seeking out leaves similar to their host plants and to compare vines and trees to see if the insects could tell what kind of plant they were landing on. While he didn’t find a big difference between plants with compound and simple leaves, he did find that there were lots of lanternflies on grape vines. Alistair also tried to lure in lanternflies with fake leaves of different colors and textures, but only two lanternflies were fooled. Although the experiment didn’t work, it’s always worth trying a little crafting in the name of science!  

Alistair observed Spotted Lanternflies on different species of plants.
Alistair found the most Spotted Lanternflies on Grape vines.

Lane, a fourth time Young Scientist and plant enthusiast, got excited about tree sap after noticing how wet a wood core was on our exploratory hike. He decided to see if different trees had different amount of saps (by measuring how wet their cores were), if different tree saps had different pHs, and if either factor was affected by the soil. Lane found that Tulip Poplars had the most sap by weight and pine trees had the least. Surprisingly, neither the moisture of the wood nor its pH was affected by where the trees were growing. Looking at Lane’s data, what we want to know next is if trees that grow quickly, like Tulip Poplars, tend to have more sap to facilitate that rapid growth! 

Lane took tree cores and analyzed them.
Lane found that Tulip Poplars have more sap than the other species he sampled.

Loreli, a fourth time Young Scientist, chose a question based on her time at our school-year Nature Club. During one Nature Club session focused on nature journaling, Loreli made some close observations of the silvery scales on Autumn Olive leaves and wondered what the point of all that “glitter” was and why some leaves were “glitterier” than others. Based on background research, she came up with four hypotheses: 1. The glitter might help protect the leaves from sun damage. 2. The glitter might help protect the leaves from insect damage. 3. The glitter might help prevent the leaves from drying out. 4. The leaves might lose glitter as they age because it gets shaken off by wind and rain. After measuring the amount of glitter on many leaves and branches, Loreli found no relationship between sun, shade, insect damage, or glitteriness, debunking hypotheses 1. and 2. There was more glitter on the bottoms of leaves, where stomata are, so it may play a role in moisture retention, but surprisingly younger leaves actually had more glitter than older ones! As always, more research is needed!  

Loreli was curious about the poorly understood “glitter” (scales) on Autumn Olive.
Loreli found that younger leaves had more glitter on them.

On the hike on the first morning, Luke, an avid birder, got interested in the songs of Red-eyed Vireos. Do they just repeat themselves over and over or do they mix up their songs every now and then? Do different individuals have different songs? When we actually set out to record vireos, we didn’t find as many as we were expecting, so we added Scarlet Tanager to the project, a serendipitous event. Luke made a “library” of phrases for each of the two species and used transition matrices to visualize how individual birds moved between phrases of their songs. Scarlet Tanagers tended to have very stereotypical orders in which they sang their phrases, while Red-eyed Vireos tended to be more random. Does this mean that the two species learn their songs differently? Or that females of the species have preferences for more or less variability? Other highlights of the week were adding Yellow-breasted Chat and Kentucky Warbler to Luke’s “life list.” 

Luke took recordings of Scarlet Tanagers and Red-eyed Vireo, then analyzed them.
Scarlet Tanagers had more predictable and consistent call patterns.
Red-eyed Vireos had less predictable and more varied call patterns.

Myla got interested in all the butterflies flying around during a very hot week and wondered what attracted them to different types of flowers. One hypothesis was that they would prefer to hang out on dense patches with lots of flowers. Another is that they would prefer different colors. To test these hypotheses, she compared the butterflies visiting Common Milkweed (pink flowers in dense patches) and Butterfly-weed (orange flowers in sparser patches). Even after controlling for the number of flowers in a patch, butterflies in general seemed to have a preference for Common Milkweed, but there were more big butterflies on Butterfly-weed. Both species of milkweed are very popular, so pick your favorite color and plant it where you can! 

Myla observed patches of milkweed to learn about the butterflies that visited.
Myla found that both species of milkweed attracted butterflies.

Nevin, a second time Young Scientist and Master Naturalist, is interested in conserving native plants and insects and wanted to study whether insects do indeed prefer native plants, as one would expect. He spent the week beat-sheeting different species of shrubs and counting the numbers of different orders of arthropods that fell off. Pin Oaks, a native species, did indeed have the most bugs, but surprisingly so did a few non-native species of plants. Nevin suspects that specialists insects, like caterpillars, may not have been captured very well with his study methods and that doing the same study at a different time of year would yield different results. One lesson learned was that there were a lot of ticks falling off of Redbuds so beware where you stand!

Nevin used beat sheets to investigate what kinds of bugs were on different species of plants.
Nevin’s results showed that Pin Oaks had the most insects on them.

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Young Scientists Research Experience Results 2023

Our Young Scientists Research Experience is one of our favorite programs of the year!
Middle and high school students spend a week with us doing their own independent research projects. They come up with a research question, collect data to answer their questions, and share their findings during a presentation to friends and family.

We’re incredibly proud of the work these students did, and we’re excited to share their results with you!

If you’d like to sign up for next year’s Young Scientist Research Experience, you can subscribe to our email newsletter to be notified when registration opens.

Here’s a quick summary of all their hard work:
Lane found that spittlebug larvae prefer to inhabit goldenrod, blackberry, and crownbeard.
Logan found that Field Sparrows are more abundant in the fields we burn than in the fields we mow.
Grant found that bigger Redbuds have more pods.
Elyssa found that more aromatic Spicebush trees actually have more insects on them.
Liam and Loreli worked together to find that the habitat preferences of dragonflies and damselflies are almost opposite those of salamander larvae.
Sarah found that insects prefer to eat lighter-colored leaves and that insect damage doesn’t appear to affect leaf color.
We want to offer special thanks to Maggie Grady! Maggie was a student in this program for the last two years. She returned this summer as a research intern but also kindly agreed to help this week as a mentor. The students appreciated having a previous participant around for guidance and we loved having Maggie’s help for the week.
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