Working Off-site

Each issue, we’ll ask a trainee to pose their career questions to an established investigator and mentor. Here, Katherine Weiss, a third-year environmental life sciences doctoral student at Arizona State University, asks for tips to optimize experiments and time spent conducting field work. Comparative physiologist Karen Sweazea, PhD, associate professor in the College of Health Solutions and School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, shares strategies for overcoming environmental challenges, handling specimens and building a skill set that will support scientists that plan to work across disciplines.

Q: Are there any key environmental variables that you would recommend always measuring at a field site when conducting comparative physiological fieldwork? If not, what is the thought process you undergo when deciding which environmental variables should be measured for a given field study?
A: I would recommend measuring any variable that could potentially impact the physiology of your study organism. Dr. Hans Selye, credited as the father of stress research, defined stress as the “nonspecific response of the body to any demand.” That being said, the specific environmental variables that I would recommend measuring depend on the type of field site you are using, such as desert, forest, urban, etc. In my own research, I care about how potential stressors such as temperature and diet impact physiology. This could include access to food and water resources, as well as the quality of those resources. In an urban environment, factors such as light, noise and air pollution may additionally alter the physiology of your research organisms. Another important consideration when planning field research is to decide on the time of day and season to conduct measurements as many physiological variables fluctuate depending on when they are measured.

Q: Do you have recommendations for how to easily preserve, store and transport samples from the field to the lab (e.g., fecal, blood or tissue samples)?
A: Methods for transporting samples depend on the stability of what you are interested in measuring as well as how far you need to travel. For example, if I am only transporting samples a short distance (e.g., one or two miles), I may choose to simply transport samples on ice. For longer distances or measuring factors that decay quickly, I would snap-freeze samples in either a transport vessel containing liquid nitrogen or in a cooler with dry ice. Transporting blood can be tricky as we typically need to separate the plasma from the formed elements prior to freezing. We do that in the field using a car adapter to run a small centrifuge, or we simply bring the samples back to the lab on ice for processing.

Q: As a wildlife ecologist interested in using comparative physiological methods to identify how environments shape ecological communities, what skills do you think are needed to properly answer questions across these two disciplines?
A: Good collaboration and reading skills! It will be important to read up on what other researchers have observed with respect to how specific environmental variables may impact physiological outcomes. Collaborating with a comparative physiologist will also help you to identify which physiological variables are meaningful in a way that could alter the health, reproductive success or longevity of the organism since different variables can trigger different physiological responses.

Got a career question you’d like to submit? Email it to education@physiology.org and we’ll consider it for an upcoming Mentoring Q&A.