SQUIRRELS!

Love them or hate them, squirrels are everywhere. That means they are not only a great research subject, but also something many of us living in Minnesota can relate to. For these reasons, the Bell has been collaborating with researchers and teachers to transform real-world research on squirrels—done as part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area Long Term Ecological Research program (MSP LTER)—into interactive learning opportunities for both students and museum visitors. 

The MSP LTER is one of twenty-eight LTER sites, funded by the National Science Foundation to sustain in-depth ecology research around North America, the Pacific Ocean, and Antarctica. In addition to this larger network, the MSP LTER brings together dozens of scientists from the University of Minnesota, the University of St. Thomas, the USDA Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy, and Water Bar to study how urban stressors affect the structure and function of nature in the Twin Cities. Together, these researchers study how city life affects urban nature. This includes pollinators, urban forests, urban watersheds, lakes and streams. The project also studies how residents of cities interact with nature near them, and how the benefits and risks of urban nature are not experienced equally by all residents. 

The Bell is collaborating on the MSP LTER as an outreach and education partner, with a specific focus on middle school students and teachers. Since the MSP LTER is so expansive, multifaceted, and complex, Bell educators had to narrow down their focus when thinking about how they would reach middle school students. What about the MSP LTER would be interesting, engaging, and accessible to students, while not straying away from the science? They landed on squirrels.

Cue Charlotte Devits, one of the researchers on the MSP LTER. Devitz’s work focuses mainly on—you guessed it—squirrels. Devitz is looking at how squirrels’ behavior changes when they live in cities and how that might impact their health. To conduct her research, she takes biological data and compares the behavior of squirrels across the metro area. As Devitz shared, squirrels are very charismatic—which makes them not only fun to work with but also their distinct behavioral traits make for easy comparisons. 

From here, the Bell started working with a local middle school teacher, Lauren Reuss, to develop a middle school-focused lab about Devitz’s squirrel research. Reuss spent the summer in the field with researchers to better understand their work and how best to translate it into a curriculum that students could engage with. She aimed to create a lab that simulated some of the things Devitz might do in the field. Students engage with real-life science by analyzing pelts, comparing videos of squirrel behavior, and creating hypotheses based on what they find. 

The lab has had great initial success, and Bell staff started considering ways to reach beyond middle school students—if this research is happening in museum visitors’ backyards, wouldn’t they want to know about it? This question led to the theme for this year’s Solution Studio exhibition. 

For several iterations, Solution Studio has been a Bell original, DIY, makerspace where visitors are challenged to “think like scientists,” in order to solve problems facing researchers today. As Holly Menninger, Interim Director of the Bell, described it, “Typically, the interactives in Solution Studio don’t have a connecting theme—I pay attention to research happening at the University of Minnesota and when something is interesting or would be a good fit, I take note. This year, we wanted to try something different. We felt like the MSP LTER would make a great fit for this interactive exhibition and would be a centralizing theme.”

Since a big aim of Devitz’s work is studying the effects of pollutants on squirrels, the Bell’s exhibits and gallery programs team developed an interactive activity for the exhibition that challenges visitors to consider how squirrels might interact with pollutants in their environment. As squirrels adjust to city conditions, they take advantage of food made and packaged for humans. This may mean they are exposed to more contaminants, including microplastics and heavy metals. In a frenzied, timed race, visitors must collect as many acorns as possible for their squirrel. Then, they have to sort out all of the microplastics. By “thinking like a squirrel,” visitors can get another perspective on urban wildlife and the city living conditions that impact squirrels, humans, and many other species.

During the run of this exhibition, Devitz has stopped by the Bell’s Learning Landscape to do live squirrel sampling. During this time, Devitz and her team catch squirrels on the landscape and take data samples, while visitors observe and ask questions. This experience gives visitors a special, behind-the-scenes look at how real research is conducted. In fact, the Bell is an official site for data collection on Devitz’s study! 

One of the interesting things about the MSP LTER project is that it isn’t just one research project in a silo—it involves many different projects to see how nature interacts and to build a more complex understanding of our ecosystem. Devitz’s work is just one project situated within a system of other projects that are all working together to understand nature in cities. Several other projects on the MSP LTER are also represented in Solution Studio, including an engineering puzzle that challenges visitors to collect a floating ball like an ecologist might collect a sample from a pond. such as a watershed activity and a pond gas collection activity. 

Those of us who live in the Twin Cities and Metro area are part of urban ecology. Therefore, it is important for us to understand our impacts and interactions with city nature. As the Bell and the researchers on the MSP LTER work to encourage curiosity for the project, squirrels are just one (cute!) catalyst for doing that.