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To know them is to love them. This is the take Matthew Persons has on the eight-legged creatures he studies. “Most people have no idea how complex the lives are of spiders,” says Persons, an associate professor in the Department of Biology. “Once you get to know them and their biology and how they react, they become a lot more interesting. You realize they have a lot more abilities than most people think they have,” he says. Persons and his many student researchers study wolf spiders. Over the years, students have studied everything from their courtship behavior to their foraging practices. But the main line of research conducted in Persons’ lab is on the predator-prey cues in the silk draglines of these arachnids. By studying the chemical cues they release in their silk, Persons and his students can determine what properties scare the proverbial pants off agriculturally destructive bugs.
This faculty-student collaboration is an example of what SU’s science faculty does best – teach science by doing science. “Students are mentored by a research advisor, but they also take ownership of a project and learn to solve open-ended problems and acquire the scientific tools necessary to answer their own questions. This is essentially what graduate training is, but our curriculum is set up so that undergraduate students can experience that here,” Persons says. “I think the proof of how well students are prepared for graduate work is the fact that many of my students have been mistaken for graduate students at various scientific conferences,” Persons adds. “A couple have even won student research awards where they have competed with Ph.D. students. To me, that is external validation that we are doing something good here.”
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