It is a chilly February morning at the Ramsay Wright Zoological Laboratories when Professor Helene Cyr presents a collection of live cockroaches to her third-year population ecology class. Students are served up with a personal sticky tray of twitching bugs-cockroaches caught within the very halls of Ramsay Wright in the past four weeks. A visible shudder worms through the group.
There are 20 students today. Most approach the cockroach trays nervously, eyeing the 20-odd sticky trays at a distance before diving in for the sample of their liking. Some stride forward with the determination of a budding ecologist with a lab report due in two weeks, and grab the traps that teem with as many bugs as possible. Others refuse to leave their seat.
With microscopes, rulers, and metal pincers, the most daring poke and prod their sample for sizes, colouration patterns, ages, and a species count of their cockroaches.
“I’m taking a conservation biology course and we’re actually using some of the stats in this course in the lab there,” says Justin Carroll, one of the brave few who shrug off the gross-out-factor.
“Cockroaches are seen as really gross animals,” Cyr says. “When you actually learn how to look at them and study them, then they become special.”
Ramsay Wright Zoological Laboratories is a 30-year-old building, boasting six floors and 23,000 square metres of teaching and research laboratories. It is also a perpetual breeding ground of insects and animals for scientific research-sometimes beneath its very floorboards.Having worked in Ramsay Wright for 12 years, Cyr has taken advantage of Ramsay Wright’s endemic insect life for her class since its conception four years ago.
“I see them all over the place,” Cyr says, “and eventually I put one and one together.” Since then, Cyr has compiled four years of population data on the cockroaches she uses to teach population ecology.
From millimetres to several centimetres in size, Cyr confirms there are at least three species of cockroaches in the building, one a South American species large enough to carry her cardboard traps away. Escaped Madagascar hissing cockroaches from a first-year biology class have also been sighted among the common cockroach haunts. But hands down, the big winners of this annual cockroach count are the brown-banded cockroach and the German cockroach.
“Just turn on a light in the dark,” says Norm White, Ramsay Wright’s animal care technician. Though cockroaches proliferate best around basement water pipes and aquariums, nearly every coffee cup, printer, or office of Ramsay Wright is fair ground to a cockroach.
But extermination is certainly out of the question. With nearly all research labs in the building dealing with animals, applying an effective pest poison to the building would spell doom for research colonies.
“This building is particularly good to cockroaches because we cannot spray any insecticides,” Cyr comments, and this policy makes Ramsay Wright one of the wealthiest spots of wildlife diversity at U of T. This year’s harvest of cockroaches, beside the odd spider, is laden with bees, a curious side effect of placing traps in one of Ramsay Wright’s many insect research labs.
“We’re interested in figuring out how populations go up and down in terms of density,” Cyr remarks of her class. With the use of computerized models and empirical data, Cyr’s lab groups study population dynamics and their application to larger population problems.
“The idea is to practise models… models where we can actually figure out how to manage populations,” Cyr says. By amassing facts and figures on cockroach birth rates, death rates, growth sizes, and life cycles, Cyr’s class can propose targets for broader applications in population management, say the babies of the population rather than its adults. “We needed a population that was easy and accessible.”
But things may not remain as they are for much longer. The departments of zoology and botany are in the midst of a reorganization process, which began last fall and came for approval before the Governing Council last month. In June, they will be replaced by the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, and the department of cell and systems biology.
As part of the reorganization, faculty members will have to shuttle labs and offices between Ramsay Wright and the Earth Sciences Centre, depending on the department they end up in. Researchers and administrative staff are taking on that task right now. At the same time, plans are being put together for the renovation of the building, due to start in July 2007. The entire building will be renovated in sections; work will last until 2009; costs are projected to run between $18 million and $21 million.
Still, Cyr is confident she’ll find cockroaches wherever she ends up. “Everyone wants the traps in their office,” she laughs. Despite her colleagues’ comfort with her project, her students aren’t nearly as well adjusted. “There’s a question of getting students to appreciate [cockroaches] a bit more.”
In response, there is a squeal of confusion behind us as a determined cockroach pulls himself free of the trap and makes his getaway. Cyr grabs the nearest sticky board and closes in with the heroic flair of a fearless scientist. The cockroach, mercilessly re-stuck on a board, wriggles in futile defiance.
“They’re really neat!” Cyr insists to her squeamish class. “Take a scope and look at them under the scope. You’ll see they’re very neat!”
Turning to me, she grins, “That’s what I call fresh.”
Science editor Mike Ghenu contributed reporting for this article.
