Friday, March 16, 2018

Tehmeena Chaudhry:

For most people, bird droppings are little more than a messy nuisance. But there’s information in those droppings! Tehmeena Chaudry, a graduate student at York University, studies the most significant pesticide of the modern age, known in brief as “Neonics”. These chemicals remain widely used in North America and elsewhere, and there is great concern about the impacts they have on wildlife, despite the claims of the manufacturers. Tehmeena’s focus is grassland birds, a group showing severe population declines. She has an interesting experimental design that involves dosing a sample of one species with neonics, studying their urine, and then using those results to assess the exposures of another species in a typical Ontario agricultural community. Her ultimate goal is to determine whether such contaminants may be a factor in grassland bird declines, and to see if bird droppings can be used effectively to assess pesticide loads in farming areas.