By KENNETH CHANG
Samantha Garvey, an 18-year-old senior at Brentwood High School on Long Island, flew cross-country last week to appear on Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime talk show. Her face was on the cover of Newsday, her hometown newspaper. Her congressman, Steve Israel, invited her to work in his office in Washington this summer. She has hired an agent to juggle interview requests.
Ms. Garvey, a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, is exhilarated by the sudden celebrity, but said she would not mind when the attention passed and she could spend more time with her mussels. (Her work on them earned her the honor.)
The Intel contest is the premier science competition for high school students, so all semifinalists earn time in the spotlight. But Ms. Garvey has received far more than the 299 others this year: She and her family are newly homeless, living in a Suffolk County shelter.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “It’s a nice place.”
Her parents were injured in a car accident last year. Her father, a cabdriver, was able to keep driving. Her mother, a nurse’s assistant, could not work for more than half a year. The eldest of three children, Ms. Garvey tried to help with the family finances, applying for jobs at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. “Nobody called me back,” she said.
The Garveys were evicted from their home on Dec. 31.
Through the turmoil, Ms. Garvey continued working with her mussels, studying a dynamic that plays out in ecosystems around the world.
The mussel species, Geukensia demissa, or ribbed mussel, is native to Long Island Sound. The Asian shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, is not. It is a predatory interloper that arrived in the waters near Cape May, N.J., in 1988, and has since spread from Maine to North Carolina.
The crabs like to eat mussels.
The scientific question was whether the ribbed mussels would just sit there and be eaten by the new predator, or had nature provided them with a means of defending themselves?
Ms. Garvey collected mussels from different parts of Flax Pond, a salt marsh on the North Shore of Long Island. She compared the shell length, width, weight and other measurements of those that lived where Asian shore crabs were prevalent with those that lived in areas with few crabs.
She found that the mussels that lived in areas where the crabs were prevalent had thicker shells. Was that because the Asian shore crabs ate the mussels they could pry open most easily, leaving thicker-shelled survivors, or were the mussels able to grow greater protection in response to the predators?
In a laboratory at Stony Brook University, Ms. Garvey put some young mussels in tanks with the crabs, although the crabs were in cages. In other tanks, mussels lived alone. After 65 days, she found that the mussels that shared their tank with the crabs had developed thicker shells than the ones that lived alone.
The finding suggests that chemicals released by the Asian shore crabs in the water set off a defense mechanism in the mussels: they produce thicker shells that fend off predators. When the crabs are not around, the mussels do not pad their shells.
During the school year, Ms. Garvey spent about a dozen hours a week on her mussel research, and much more during the summer. In all, she spent two and a half years on the work, as part of a research curriculum that Rebecca Grella, a Brentwood High School chemistry teacher, successfully pitched to administrators eight years ago.
More than 60 students now take part. Ms. Grella, a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook, took advantage of her university connections to match Ms. Garvey with Dianna Padilla, a professor in the ecology and evolution department at Stony Brook, for the mussel research.
Brentwood is a melting-pot community with more of a reputation for gangs than for budding scientists, but last year, Ms. Grella’s efforts paid off when three of her students were named Intel semifinalists.
This year, two weeks after her family became homeless, Ms. Garvey found out she was among this year’s semifinalists.
She said she could not imagine what her life would be like if she had not had the opportunity to study mussels. “Maybe flunking out of school, honestly,” she said.
Instead, she hopes to attend Brown or Yale. Ms. DeGeneres’s show has already given her a $50,000 scholarship.
On Tuesday evening, Ms. Garvey will be in Washington, a guest of Mr. Israel, sitting in the House of Representatives gallery listening to President Obama deliver the State of the Union address. On Wednesday, she will find out if she is one of the 40 Intel finalists for a top prize of $100,000.
Life will soon resume an air of normalcy. A day after Intel announced its semifinalists, Suffolk County officials said they had found a home for the Garveys.
Then there will be time for mussels.
“The marsh — it smells and stuff,” Ms. Garvey said. “But I still love it. It’s home.”
NYT
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment