Professor receives grant for study

By Lauren Goodman
Daily Forty-Niner

Cal State Long Beach biology professor James Archie was recently awarded a three-year, $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

His project, "Evolutionary Significance of Mitochondrial DNA Clade Boundaries," will study the geographical patterns of genetic variation in the western fence lizard.

There are 11 different genetic groups of the western fence lizard in California. The distribution of species throughout the western United States include California, Nevada, western Utah, southern Idaho and eastern Oregon, according to Archie. Through the project, Archie will investigate whether environmental or historical factors are responsible for the origin and maintenance of the geographic separation of the various fence lizards, or if the separation is due to the genetic factors within the reptiles themselves.

The grant will be used for travel expenses, equipment, supplies and to support students assisting with the research, Archie said.

"It's not a tremendously large grant, but it is adequate for doing what I want with it. I actually requested a larger amount of money and they only gave me two-thirds of what I asked for, so I had to cut back on some aspects of my research. But it will take me a lot further than I have been able to get," Archie said. "It's not easy to get funding. In fact, I submitted 10 proposals before this one got funded, so persistence paid off in this case."

Archie, a CSULB faculty member for 11 years, has been working on his project for six years and often involves students from the herpetology class he teaches.

"The first part of my research is to sample the individual species range. I already have collections throughout California, Nevada and parts of Oregon. The second part is to look at the boundaries between the different genetic groups," Archie said. "For some unknown reason there are very distinct separate genetic groups, and there is no reason why individual lizards couldn't just dispense among the boundaries."

"My objective is to discover why these boundaries are stable and why genes don't flow across them. Based on the pattern of the distribution of the genetic groups there are lots of different boundaries to look at," Archie said.

In the field, Archie and his students use 16-foot extendable fishing poles to capture lizards by putting a small noose around their heads. After being caught unharmed, they are measured, scanned with a flatbed scanner or photographed.

Then a piece of the lizards' tails are removed and preserved, before the lizards are released.

"We are not doing anything to the lizard that does not occur naturally in the environment," Archie said. "Students like going out in the field, but when they get back in the lab they are learning real modern genetic techniques for DNA analysis, so it's a real balanced practice. It's a lot of fun but it's also lots of work."

Archie and his students plan to go out in the field for collections one more time this fall and then to Nevada for spring break next year.