Student Profile: Devin DiGiacopo
“I don’t think I’m an adult yet because I like being a kid too much but I’m also not quite a kid anymore. I feel like I’ve been in a transition stage ever since high school. It felt very abrupt in high school, around senior year, I just felt like I went through…kind of like a reform, like a personal reform. I realized that I had new values and I thought a lot differently and everything became fluid. I’ll hold onto that limbo for as long as I can. I think it’s a good place to be. One thing I never want to lose, just wanting to explore. Truly a lot of people do lose that.”
“This summer, hopefully, I’ll do community level studies, which are what I like to talk about cause they’re super cool. We essentially reconstruct wetlands in cattle tanks up in the nature preserve, like these big pools basically. So, I’ll let the communities do their thing with one of the only variables being pesticide concentration and the other being how tolerant the population of wood frogs in there are. One thing we see a lot in ecotoxicology is an otherwise small effect to an organism initiates a cascade of effects in the community. That’s what we’re really looking for.”
“I think food is one of the biggest impacts you can have, especially in America. We just eat an absurd amount of meat. I love meat and I’m not going vegan by any means but I’m certainly trying to eat less meat and be more responsible like buy seasonally, buy locally with my produce. Another thing is water consumption. With all these things if you just think about it, like, try to live in a way that everyone could live, consider that there’s 7 billion people and there’s a lot of people that live a lot worse than us. That’s just a people to people thing, that’s not just about the planet. If you could just shut your light off just so someone else can have their light on at that time.”
From Wetlands Community into Ours
It is a warm spring evening and behind Binghamton University there is a medley of frogs chirping, croaking, and jumping. A concert fills the air with sounds that broadcast one clear objective, find a mate and make some babies. Individuals of a more apish appearance are also trying to get in on the action. Out here, Devin DiGiacopo and other field mates are looking for frogs in amplexus, literally in ‘an embrace’. This mating position, typical of frogs and toads, involves the male wrapping its arms around a female from behind so to stimulate her to lay eggs. Usually, the search for frisky frogs is done at night with little more than a flashlight and an attuned sense of hearing. This is a challenging prospect, but Devin assures us “it’s really fun and goes back to my childhood.”
Back when we were young, not too many of us may have had the sleight of hand to catch the subjects of our curiosity. Birds flew too high, fish swam too deep, squirrels moved too quickly. Faced with an opportunity to house an animal companion, Devin took matters into his own hands. “I was asking for a dog but they didn’t want to get one so I was like, how about a snake? [My parents] didn’t think I could get it and 5 min later I was back with a snake in my hands.” Devin grew up in Bergen County, NJ adjacent to Rockland County, NY. Although the son of two fine arts graduates, Devin had always found a comfort being outdoors, exploring the wetlands behind his house, and going “knee deep in it and grabbing stuff.”
Like a lot of teenagers with too much energy to spend, Devin dabbled in all sports available to him from tennis to basketball to swimming. By the end of his high school career, wrestling came to shape a lot of who he has grown to become. “It gave me really good discipline and people who wrestle will understand it. There’s a lot of camaraderie but there’s a lot of hard work and everyone has to do their job. I think that’s really translated to work ethic as a graduate student and knowing my place in my lab [from] being a leader [to] knowing when to follow.” The latter is a skill that is particularly useful in a dynamic learning environment where one day you’re teaching a class of students and the next you’re nose deep in research articles. “It boils down to humility, you should always be willing to take cues from people whether that’s your superiors or someone that you’re mentoring. On the total opposite side [is] being confident enough to know when you have a good idea and to propose confidently that your peers should at least consider it.”
Devin learned these life lessons concurrent to exercising the more technical aspects needed to treat animals as a veterinarian intern. He took an interest in veterinarian work after failing to save a deer fawn with broken legs on the side of the road. However, the daily tasks left him with more questions than answers and a desire to return outside away from an office. His interests in conservation and the theory behind it began to sprout, that’s when a trip to Costa Rica, through Binghamton University, changed everything. “We were staying in these tiny, tiny cabins in the middle of the jungle with no power for like a month and working with the locals everyday restoring trails and building ponds. [Then] we would come home and have a lecture around a table with a beer.” That’s where Devin fell in love with community and ecosystems ecology; where he experienced a “scientific reawakening” when tying conservation theory with the physical application of digging holes.
Today, Devin works in Dr. Hua’s laboratory who “focuses on how pesticides and other pollutants influence wetland ecosystems.” Their research is informed by a prolific lineage of scientists including, but not limited to, work by Earl Werner, Rick Relyea and Jason Hoverman who “essentially look at how humans affect wetland communities […] understanding wetland ecosystems, their interactions, their chemistry.” Devin’s research centers around the “costs associated with constitutive and inducible (plastic) defenses to pesticides in freshwater aquatic organisms, and subsequent implications for abundance and diversity within communities.” In plain English, “if you think evolutionarily, you have a new trait that is beneficial in one way but what are the costs” to hosting that trait? For example, studies have shown some daphnia, a small zooplankton which serve as an established model organism, with increased tolerance to metal pollution had reduced grazing habits compared to less tolerant populations. In this case, the cost of increased tolerance to metal pollution is a decrease in feeding efficiency. Devin is investigating whether the same kind of phenomena can be observed in affected amphibian populations, “and not only that [but] how do the costs to potentially one organism, affect the community?”
Back in the nature preserve Devin and the team are finishing up their work by collecting egg masses. The wood frogs Devin works with find a happy home in the nature preserve, our university’s backyard. Delving deeper, Devin is investigating whether increased pesticide tolerance in wood frogs could lead to less effective digestion of food, evasion of predators, or increased susceptibility to parasites. “I want to look at those specific trophic interactions. That’s what I’m going to do this spring once we get some amphibians. This summer, hopefully, I’ll do community level studies.” Reflecting on his work regarding community structures there’s an idea that extends beyond wetland communities and into our own. No individual is isolated from their respective communities. Effects on an individual, even seemingly minute ones, can create a cascade of downstream effects that leaves no other member of the community untouched.
