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“Once you start looking at insects, they are so beautiful, so interesting,” says Idelle Cooper ’01, associate professor of biology. 

This summer, Cooper took four students and her 11-month-old son, Wendell, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for a four-week Mentored Advanced Project (MAP) field research experience to study jewelwing damselflies. “It’s an animal behavior study that has to take place in the field while the insects are flying around in the summer, making choices about mates,” she explains.

A grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB-2242987) supports Cooper’s research, which focuses on two jewelwing damselfly species, their evolution, and which traits the insects use to select a mate. 

Nature Without Distractions

To conduct their research, the team traveled to the Hiram College Northwoods Field Station in a pristine area of northern Michigan surrounded by the Hiawatha National Forest. 

The accommodations at the field station were rustic; their cabins didn’t have cell phone coverage, wi-fi, or electricity. The main lodge did have electricity and a kitchen for cooking meals. But for the most part, they got along without modern amenities. 

“I think there was a little bit of withdrawal,” Cooper says. But after a short period of adjustment, the students enjoyed hearing loons on nearby Cherry Lake, seeing beavers and other wildlife, and fishing for their dinner. 

Josh Emrys Payong ’27, a biology and English major from the Philippines, agrees; he fell in love with field research during a previous project and was anxious to continue exploring nature in person. “There were several occasions when we just knelt in the stream to feel the water flow around our waists, to hear the birds sing and to see the bugs dance in pairs,” he says.

Yudie Hu ’26 agrees and says she grew accustomed to life in the Northwoods. “I now miss the quietness from having no signals, away from electronics,” she says. “I also missed picking wild berries! It was delicious and made me feel like a wild bear.” 

Cooper hopes to continue visiting this area of Michigan, partly for her research, but also for her son. She wants Wendell to experience nature without distractions. 

“I think it’s really great to have that space away from the screens we are all addicted to, just the noise of modern life,” Cooper says.

Love Language of the Damselfly

Cooper and her students spent time watching the insects conduct their courtship rituals in the streams. “They’re so much more complex than you might imagine insects to be,” she says. The damselflies’ intricate courtship dances feature many different steps; sometimes, they even flop into the water and then pop back up. 

The researchers’ challenge was to design experiments that would test which traits are the most important in choosing a mate. To evaluate their hypothesis that wing pigmentation is one of the deciding factors for a jewelwing damselfly looking for love, Cooper and the students designed an experiment to manipulate that trait.

“We figured out a way to cut the wings off and then glue on other wings,” Cooper says. Using an X-acto knife and fly-fishing glue that dries quickly under UV light, they transplanted the wings from one insect to another. 

Does this process hurt the damselflies? Cooper says scientists believe that the wings are a lot like fingernails or feathers; you can cut them and glue on another without causing pain. And amazingly, the insects can still fly with their new wings. 

A Day in the Research Life

After spending the morning transferring wings between the insects they had caught the night before, Cooper and her team put the damselflies in a cooler to keep them calm. Next, they took them to the stream and set up the experiments, tethering pairs of insects using fine, strong thread tied in tiny slipknots. A male flying by could choose between the pair of tethered damselflies. 

Sophia Unzicker ’26, a biology major from St. Louis, says it’s a delicate operation that requires practice and steady hands. “Now we know how to tie tiny slipknots!” she says. “It was an amazing skill to learn.” 

And then, they sat back to watch and record the show. 

They expected the males to choose insects with female wings, which have a prominent white spot at the end. “To our surprise, the males preferred to mate with individuals, male or female, who had male wings. The students were so delighted, I think, to find something different than expected.”

Unzicker says the results turned their hypothesis on its head. “I think it is beautiful that even when humans see nature one way, science can show us the little details we are missing.” 

Cooper and her students are eager to conduct follow-up experiments in the future to better understand what they observed. 

“I would love to continue this work,” says Colby Jaros ’26, a biology major from North Carolina. “As we collected more data, we figured out how much we didn’t know. We ended up with so many questions about the damselflies themselves but also about how the environment affected them.”

Studying Nature in Nature

Cooper loves giving students a taste of the faculty-led research experience she had as a ������Ƶ student working with Professor of Biology Jackie Brown. “It’s certainly the experience that I had that introduced me to scientific research and the joy of studying nature in nature,” she says.

She also wants her students to know that there is plenty left for them to discover in the world. In no way have we learned everything there is to learn about evolution or biology. “I think it’s good to teach them all the things that are not known that they can discover,” Cooper says. “They can discover something new that no one has ever known.”