103-7 Crafting a Chione Collaboration

Session: Balancing Tradition and Innovation: Evolving Geoscience Curricula for a Changing World (Posters)

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Providing opportunities for undergraduate students to have authentic and meaningful research experiences in a lab setting is one of the most impactful ways to build belonging and self-efficacy in earth science students. Furthermore, allowing graduate students the opportunity to mentor undergraduate researchers has the added benefit of developing mentoring skills in graduate students and building a cohesive lab community. However, it can sometimes be challenging to create and carve out individual research projects that are accessible, appropriate to the experience and skill level of the undergraduate student, interesting, and meaningful. Here, we present a research relationship built in our lab that models the creation of undergraduate research projects and their relationship to larger lab goals. 

This project uses a collection of fossil Chione, a genus of bivalves, collected from the Ground Creek Formation (~3.5 MA) of Bocas del Toro, Panama, as both an ecological test case, as well as calibration for a digital imaging workflow known as AutoMorph. This genus was selected for testing this imaging technique as it had a large sample size across the selected faunule, and relatively simple “clam-shaped” morphology that was easily identifiable by junior systematists. In these samples, this genus also has a large variation in size for both physical and digital measuring, which provided the opportunity for researchers to test the protocol and expand their skillset. In addition, the genus Chione has a unique ecology, as a conspicuous inhabitant of Caribbean seagrass beds, which allowed for independent ecological investigation and the development of a separate line of questioning. The strategic fragmentation of this larger research project into tasks that engaged different skills and interests allowed us to engage several undergraduate researchers in a way that met them where they were, built on their skills and interests, and promoted collaboration. In addition, the projects were strategically defined so that they contributed to the broader goals of the lab, which not only fostered a sense of purpose in student researchers, but also advanced the larger research agenda. 

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

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