KASUN BODAWATTA ’15 came to Earlham pretty sure that he would major in geology. That changed when he happened to enroll in an ecology class taught by Wendy Tori, Professor of Biology and Martha Sykes Hansen Endowed Chair in Biology for Ornithology.
On the first day of class, Tori introduced her students to manakins, a family of small, tropical birds that are known for their spectacular courtship dances. But as the video played in the background, Tori didn’t just sit and watch quietly as the birds did their thing. Much to the delight and amusement of her students, she danced along with them.
“She had so much energy. And she was super excited to show this video of a manakin dancing while she was also dancing,” he said, still laughing at the memory of that first class more than a decade later. “She was very passionate about the birds, and I thought, this is super cool.”
That moment, and the semester that followed, wound up being a revelation: for Bodawatta, the allure of gems and minerals simply couldn’t compete with the wonder and beauty of the living world. He changed his major to biology and over the course of his career at Earlham he took several more classes with Tori.
Today, he is a full-fledged evolutionary biologist in his own right. He’s a principal investigator on his own research projects and has collaborated on cutting-edge scientific research with Tori, his former professor. Both are delighted that their academic relationship has continued long after the final grades were recorded for that first class.
For each, it’s a true full-circle moment.
“Earlham was special. You have a lot of opportunities to do research with the professors and have these experiences,” said Bodawatta, who today works at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark with a focus on microbiomes and parasitic infections. “It was so nice to learn from Wendy. And now it’s so much fun to work together and then go to places, see birds, and also collect data for interesting research questions.”
Tori, who has now traveled with her former student on research trips to places as far-flung as Papua New Guinea and Peru, agrees.
“We haven’t stopped working together,” she said. “It’s been a great long journey, which has been very rewarding.”
‘Birds are so amazing’
What is it about birds? It’s not that they’re a rare or hard to find commodity. There are around 11,000 known species that live on every continent and call every kind of habitat home: ocean, desert, mountains, forests, grasslands, freshwater lakes, rivers, and beyond. Birds can have vibrant plumage or dull camouflage, and can be as small as the miniature Bee Hummingbird, which weighs less than a dime, and as large as a nine-foot-tall ostrich weighing as much as 350 pounds.
Although they are as omnipresent as they are diverse, there’s nothing ordinary about them, Tori taught her students.
“Birds are so amazing. They’re easily seen, vocal, beautiful, colorful,” Tori said. “They can bring people together and they can provide enjoyment of nature wherever you are.”
But that’s just scratching the surface of what birds can do to help us better understand our world.
“They’re super important. They play many important roles in the ecosystems, and there’s already a lot of information available about them,” she said. “So you can ask complex questions related to evolution, conservation, management, ecosystem health, among many others.”
As a teacher and researcher, it’s clear that Tori is deeply devoted to both her subject and her students. Close to Earlham, she’s involved in the Eastern Bluebird and Tree Swallow Project in which she and students–including Bodawatta as an undergraduate–study reproductive behavior in these species.
Farther afield, she had a long-term Amazon manakin project in which she studied the birds’ “lekking” mating systems, which she describes as akin to a “male discotheque.”
Tori, who has now traveled with her former student on research trips to places as far-flung as Papua New Guinea and Peru, agrees. As a teacher and a researcher, it’s clear that Tori is deeply devoted to both her subject and her students. Close to Earlham, she’s involved in the Eastern Bluebird and Tree Swallow Project in which she and students — including Bodawatta as an undergraduate — study reproductive behavior in these species. Farther afield, she had a long-term Amazon manakin project in which she studied the birds’ “lekking” mating systems, which she describes as akin to a “male discotheque.”
In a collaboration with Jaime Coon, assistant professor of biology and environmental sustainability, she’s looking at how grassland birds in the Grand River Grasslands of Iowa and Missouri are affected by climate change and land management strategies like grazing and burning. Many Earlham students are helping with this research, Tori said.
A singular student
Bodawatta’s aptitude for science and learning was apparent from the beginning, Tori said. He even had enthusiasm for a work-study job taking care of the earwigs she used in her animal behavior class.
“You get that feeling that this student has this energy inside. I mean, he was even willing to work with earwigs, which are not the most flashy animals,” she said. “He was ready to do anything, excited about learning stuff and doing stuff. And so as soon as I had some bird-related research, we started working on it together.”
As an undergraduate, he contributed to the Eastern Bluebird and Tree Swallow Project and traveled with Tori to Ecuador for her research with manakins.
When a student connects with a professor and a subject at the right time, it’s like a key sliding into a lock. Turn the key, and a world of experience can open up for a young mind eager to learn, and that is what happened with the young scientist.
The spark lit during Tori’s ecology class never went out for Bodawatta. After graduation, Bodawatta went to Denmark to pursue his masters’ degree in ecology and evolution at the University of Copenhagen, then his doctoral degree in avian-microbe symbiosis from the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.
A tradition of collaboration
In 2019, as a graduate student studying the gut microbiomes of wild birds in Papua New Guinea, he was able to invite Tori to join him. He figured she’d jump at the chance, and he was right. That small island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean is home to birds-of-paradise, a lekking species known for the males’ vibrant plumage and dramatic dances that was at the top of Tori’s bird bucket list.
“It’s the place I always dreamed of going and seeing these birds,” she said. “Kasun asked, ‘Do you want to come?’ And I said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening.’”
Keeping a tradition going, Tori brought two Earlham students with her, Ian Shriner ’21 and Sam Pigott ’21, for what became a memorable research trip. The students, working with the guidance of the two scientists, studied factors affecting feather mites and their avian hosts on Mount Wilhelm, the highest mountain in Papua New Guinea.
For Bodawatta and Tori, it was a joy to work with Shriner and Pigott in the field and work through the stages of the scientific process with them from experiential design and data collection to publishing the results in the Journal of Avian Biology.
“It was a great experience to mentor these students together and to have the opportunity to learn so much about the local birds,” Tori said.
As for the birds-of-paradise, the first day the research team woke up in Papua New Guinea, they could hear the birds singing in the rainforest nearby. They searched for them, and eventually found some and even saw them dancing.
“It was so amazing seeing them. It was just like a dream come true,” Tori said. “Beautiful, beautiful. It’s hard to even describe in words the feeling of seeing them. I had waited so long to see them. So amazing.”
Pigott, a biology major who is now a documentary filmmaker, said that the month he spent living and working in the mountains of Papua New Guinea — his first research trip outside the U.S. — was incredible.
“I’d done field research before that, but this was like really hardcore science research,” he said. “Papua New Guinea, for birders, is like heaven. There’s no other place in the world that has more unique, rare species. So to go with two ornithologists was just amazing. It was everything you would imagine it to be. And Wendy and Kasun were both super supportive and helpful the whole time.”
The trip, and his other classes with Tori, made an impression on Pigott. After graduation, he was selected for a Watson Fellowship to travel the world and examined what he calls the social side of conservation. Through his travels, he heard many stories about environmental crimes that have taken place at private nature reserves and about greenwashing, which happens when a company or organization makes misleading claims about how environmentally friendly its practices or products are.
“I always have a camera on me,” he said, and began to document what he was seeing. Pigott joined forces with Shriner, also a biology major, to make a documentary, How to Get Away with Greenwashing. They showed a 20-minute version to a receptive audience at Climate Week NYC last fall, and are actively fundraising now to finish a longer version that they hope will be widely released.
“Even though I don’t want to be doing data collection science exactly, one of the main reasons I want to stay in that field is because of Wendy,” Pigott said. “I think she and Kasun both did a very good job of nurturing a passion. I would say they definitely had a very profound impact on my interests. And certainly Earlham is an institution with a very strong social justice orientation. It’s hard not to see things with that perspective, and hopefully I can bring that through film.”
In addition to bird microbiomes, Bodawatta is also asking questions about what mosses can reveal about the surrounding environment. Often, birds, mammals, and insects can be secretive and the vegetation where they live can be dense. Finding these animals to study them in the wild takes time and resources that sometimes scientists don’t have.
Mosses, on the other hand, don’t move and aren’t hard to find. Bodawatta is hypothesizing that the mosses act as a recorder of the life happening around them through the accumulation of environmental DNA from the air and the water. By swiping the surface of the moss with a cotton swab, analyzing the DNA extracted from the swabs, and comparing the sequenced genetic material to what’s already known about birds, mammals, insects, and more, it may be possible to obtain a very good record of the biodiversity of the environment.
“It’s a simple method. If it works, it’s a good method,” he said. “It can have useful implications for conservation strategies and monitoring programs.”
Right now, he’s working to prove whether his hypothesis is good, and has received a grant from the Villum Experiment Programme to help him do that. The Danish program is aimed at out-of-the-ordinary research proposals that challenge the norm and have the potential to fundamentally change the way people look at important topics.
“You come up with new, crazy ideas,” Bodawatta said. “Usually they support things that shouldn’t work, or that other grant agencies might not support because it’s a high-risk project.”
And when it came time to go into the field to start testing his “crazy idea,” he reached out to a familiar person: Tori. They needed to go to a place in the tropics with well-researched biodiversity in order to test the methodology and decided on Peru, where Tori grew up and where her parents still live.
A haven of biodiversity in Peru
Last summer, the scientists, along with Tori’s husband, José-Ignacio Pareja, lecturer in nutrition science and science technology learning specialist at Earlham, headed to three sampling sites in southeastern Peru that included Manù National Park located at the meeting point of the tropical Andes and the Amazon Basin. The park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, celebrated as a haven of terrestrial biodiversity, and features high grasslands, cloud forests, mountain forests, and lowland rainforests.
To get to one of the sampling sites at the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in the park, they had to embark on a two-day journey crossing multiple streams in the Andean cordillera, then an eight-hour boat ride up the Manù River.
“Then we got to this pristine forest,” Bodawatta said.
They were there for a little more than three weeks, during which they gathered many DNA samples off mosses and Tori even saw her first jaguar sitting by a forest stream. The research trip was idyllic, but getting the permits to collect and export the cotton swabs with their DNA samples was much less dreamy.
“What Kasun and I were doing in that research project is really new. And there’s no specific laws to apply for research permits to work with environmental DNA yet,” Tori said. “There’s no procedure on how to deal with something so new in Peru.”
The Peruvian government, erring on the side of caution, did not allow the scientists to take all the samples out of the country. Tori had a flash of inspiration: why not bring them to her parents’ home and store them in a small refrigerator there? That’s what they did, and the samples stayed there for four months until she was able to send them safely to Denmark, where a research assistant is currently working on them in the lab.
“Wendy was the backbone of the project. Everything needed to happen in Spanish,” Bodawatta said. “If she wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have been able to do the field work or collect the samples, or even process them right now. She managed to find people that might know the answers, or could try to get the answers. As an outsider, I would not have been able to do it.”
Their long friendship and trust meant that he knew he could count on her to save both the samples and the study.
“I think it made it possible to say, ‘OK, this will work, one way or another. Do not worry,’” Tori said.
Her parents — who had her disinfect the small refrigerator very carefully after she removed the environmental DNA samples — became a part of the study, too.
“They were happy to do it,” Tori said. “My dad said, ‘Well, make sure to put me in the acknowledgements after my refrigerator was full for four months.’”
For the two scientists, the future of their work together is full of possibilities. One thing is certain: they will keep on collaborating on research that will help to answer some of the world’s mysteries. Birds, environmental DNA, and more, they are ready to answer the call. ■
Written by Jay Kibble