URI student wants to be where the wild things are - The Westerly Sun

RICHMOND — Emma Paton, the daughter of two biological scientists, comes by her interest in wildlife naturally. Now in her junior year at the University of Rhode Island, Paton, who is majoring in wildlife and conservation biology, spent 10 weeks last summer in the New Mexico wilderness with URI associate professor Nancy Karraker, studying the endangered Jemez Mountains salamander. Paton received financial support for her research trip from URI’s Coastal Fellows program.

Deliberately set fires known as prescribed burns are used in New Mexico and other western states to reduce fuel sources for wildfires, and Paton explained that the burns can also affect wildlife, including amphibians like the Jemez salamander.

“One of the goals that Dr. Karraker had was to learn about their movements below ground so we could maybe understand if there’s any point during the season when they go below ground and that would be a good time to do these prescribed burns,” she said.

With many of the decaying logs preferred by the salamanders damaged or gone, the research team set up substitute cover such as boxes and artificial rock piles. Still, in the 10 weeks she worked on the project, Paton saw few of the Jemez salamanders.

“When I was out there, we found 24,” she said. “There are still people out there who are continuing the work until the end of September and I believe they found three more.”

Paton, 20, was born at Westerly Hospital to U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Suzanne Paton and Peter Paton, a professor in URI’s Department of Natural Resources Science. The family lives in Richmond. Suzanne Paton said that after Emma graduated from Chariho High School in 2016, she promptly left the country to do field biology.

“She took a gap year after high school and she went to Ecuador for three months and then she spent two months in Costa Rica climbing trees and helping with the reintroduction of great green macaws,” she said. “So for her to go off to New Mexico for the summer was no big deal. She’s been off doing her own thing for a while.”

The Patons visited their daughter in New Mexico and Suzanne said she was surprised by the physical demands of the field work. 

“It was incredibly hard work,” she said. “They carry 45 pounds of water on their back plus their backpack on the front, sometimes 50 or 60 pounds of gear and they’re hiking at 11,000 feet up these steep hillsides looking for salamanders in these real remote mountains.”

Karraker said Paton's curiosity and enthusiasm persisted, even on the most physically demanding days.

"One of the things I really appreciated with her was at the end of an exhausting day, packing in 50 pounds and hiking and being in the heat 10 hours, driving an hour and a half back to the office after work, exhausted and filthy, I'm always interested in the science," she said. "I want to just talk about the science. I'm probably a boring person that way, and Emma is somebody who, every day at the end of the day, no matter how tired she was, she'd still have a question."

An early interest in wildlife

Emma began joining her parents in the field at an early age.

“She loves being outside,” Suzanne said. “She loves animals, she always has. She went to work with us essentially and I don’t think she thought it was any big deal, like all kids go and look for amphibians when it rains with their parents and all kids help their parents rope the beach for plovers or go and count frogs with their dad at a vernal pool. It wasn’t until she got older that she realized that most kids don’t grow up that way.”

Suzanne remembers Emma being interested in birds, amphibians and reptiles from the time she was about 3 years old.

“She would catch a toad or catch a frog and come and ask me what it was,” she said. “She would catch snakes. She wanted to know what the butterflies were and what the birds were and what all the different animals in the yard were, and of course, since that’s what we do, I told her what they were.”

Suzanne also recalled a trip to New York City with Emma and her older sister Kayla to see a ballet. Emma was 6 at the time.

“We were walking down the street just as it was getting dark and it started raining and I just remember her looking up at me and saying ‘this would be a great night to look for frogs’ because anytime it rained, we would go out looking for frogs moving and salamanders moving across roads and she would always help us catch them and identify them,” she said.

As Emma got older, she realized that she was interested in studying wildlife biology.

“I just happened to be like my parents,” she said. “It definitely helped to have the influence when I was younger … I remember going out with my dad and when I was little, I’d go out in the field with him. I remember going bird banding with him when I was younger. Going out with my mom, too. She’d do plover work, and just going birding with them for fun. Yeah, that was a big part of my childhood.”

When Emma returned from her gap year, she studied for a year at the University of New Hampshire before transferring to URI. “I think part of it was, she really wanted to work with Dr. Karraker,” her mother said. “She had interacted with her and she said ‘I would love to work with her.’ Nancy is a great mentor for young women and she’s so enthusiastic about working with amphibians. It’s infectious.”

Karraker described Paton as a good fit for the research team.

"I wanted somebody who was going to be as astounded with nature as I continue to be and somebody who would see the smallest thing, a new bird or a new plant and get how amazing and glorious these things are," she said. "I knew she had that in her. She kind of had the right combination of somebody who's going to work hard and really appreciates nature, which is what I really needed out there."

Paton hasn’t decided on a focus in graduate school but she knows it will involve field work.

“I’m not really picky about the species I’m working with, but I do love to be outside,” she said. “I definitely love to travel and go to new places I’ve never been before. I think that’s important, to get out and see new places and just to meet people in the field. The more exposure you can have, the better."

https://ift.tt/2AuvFT3