Melody

"We survive as a group. Being alive means being together."

By Students of NYC

February 16^th, 2024

"The New York Hall of Science — I kind of grew up there. My dad would take me there on the weekends. I remember going all around in the little stroller. And honestly, one of the best memories I have is going to the cornerstone exhibit with all sorts of insects. There were these giant Madagascar cockroaches. Hissing cockroaches, which are surprisingly different. And the ant colonies. There was a plexiglass exhibit where you could see all the trails of the colony, and I really loved that. I love seeing what’s smaller than myself. There’s a whole world down there that I feel like is so underappreciated, especially in insects. And that’s why I think entomology is super underrated. Everyone seems to turn up their nose at insects, and it’s just like, why? These ants are building cities too. Why are they so overlooked, so insignificant in our mind’s eye? Because we are at the top of everything? It’s civilization at its core. It’s a shared intelligence, that community empathy. Ants will come together if something is attacking. If one insect is injured, others will come to its aid and fend off predators. It’s really intrinsic to our existence. We survive as a group. It’s just us. Being alive means being together. It's a message that's lost on us. There's something we can learn from seeing the little guys.

In my summer program at Queens College, my classmates nicknamed me Bug Girl. We had this amazing professor, Professor Griffin. He’d take us on field trips to all these parks and preserves in the city. The first trip, I chased after a daddy long legs and picked it up. I didn’t think I would do that, but there was something about the whole setting that made me do it. It's a whole daddy long legs. It's alive in my hands. I just dangled it in my classmate's faces. Who does that? So yeah, that’s where my nickname came from. I didn’t mind it. One girl came up to me a little while later, and she was like, 'Melody, I used to hate bugs. Severe arachnophobia. But seeing you pick that bug up was like, wow. I think I can do that too.' She told me how she had gone home and there was a big bug in her bathroom or something, and instead of calling someone else to get rid of it or kill it, she ended up getting it herself and taking it outside. That's a big deal. I was really proud of that.

After that program, I found myself researching a lot of online laboratories. I ended up on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory website. And I remember just scrolling through it and finding various barcoding programs. Barcoding is using DNA to identify species, and it's used mostly for ecological preservation. So I ended up on the website just scrolling through. There were all these programs saying 'contact us if you want to be involved.' One of the people, Mr. Petracca, was an entomologist, and I was like, entomologist, that's a bug person. I’m the bug girl. You think maybe we could relate, right? So I just cold emailed him hoping he'd respond. And he did. And that moment shifted a lot, because had he not responded, I would not have been part of anything that came afterwards. And I don't think I would've found my passion the way I did. I asked him, oh, could you tell me a little bit more about this U.S. barcoding program and how can I be part of it? He introduced me to a vector ecologist that was really interested in the relationship between Lycaenidae butterflies and ants. Cut to months later when I met them at New York Hall of Science one Saturday and we spent an entire day barcoding these ants. We used DNA Subway, a bioinformatics database to investigate genomes, trim DNA sequences and analyze the actual barcode. It was a whole process to isolate their DNA. The ants themselves were just in jumbles. We had to separate them out. You’d have to get one smaller ant because there could be multiple different species in the tubes. And they actually told me not to use the bigger ants. They are harder to crush, you can’t get as fine of their DNA and genetic material if they’re so huge and there are chunks of their bodies still there.

We worked for eight hours straight. But it was worth it: When we got the results back, we found out that we had discovered a new undocumented species of ant that is most likely of Southeast Asia origin! Our samples were uploaded onto GenBank, an international database where we can use other people's catalogs in order to reference ours. It’s so cool because our names are on there now. And my mentor, Mr. Petracca, he was so gracious to actually have them list my name first."