Teaching with Project WILD!

By: Marlene Jocke, Warnell Outreach Intern & Student Ambassador

Hi! It’s Marlene again! I had the privilege of sitting in on a day with Dr. Nick Fuhrman, also known as “Ranger Nick,” for his Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management study “abroad” (instead of going to another country, the class was traveling around Georgia during May). On the day I stopped by, his students were earning their Project WILD certification by instructing a guided lesson plan in teams of two from the Project WILD curriculum book. 

If you don’t know (and I didn’t know much before this day), Project WILD is an interdisciplinary conservation and environmental education program with the goal to assist learners of all ages in developing awareness, knowledge, skills, and commitment resulting in informed decisions, responsible behavior, and constructive actions concerning wildlife and the environment.

Ranger Nick had students teach the class a lesson from the curriculum book. They didn’t have to follow the lesson plan word-for-word, as things always happen, and you might have to pivot during an activity. It was fun to have to pretend we were high schoolers, 5^th graders, or any other age of kid for each activity, and while they were geared towards grade schoolers, any activity we did could be altered for any age—including adults. Being able to teach a wide range of audiences is important to convey not only the material you want to discuss but also resonate with your audience and have them remember a valuable message. Teaching is how you can change hearts and minds and students in this PRTM study abroad course were encouraged to see themselves as teachers. 

As a Wildlife Science major and having worked at a nature-based summer camp, I know all too well about how important it is to be able to plan activities that are engaging and leave the audience with a clear takeaway. The summer camp I worked at the past two summers was at the Chattahoochee Nature Center, and it was always amazing to have a camper remember something they were taught earlier in the week. I would always catch myself getting excited to go over the lesson we’d have for the day with the kids, especially with my knowledge of the natural world.

As we were wrapping up the day with Ranger Nick’s students, I realized that the Science Education Activities (or SEA’s) that we implemented at the Chattahoochee Nature Center, were most likely derived from the Project WILD activity guide. I guess that goes to show how good the activities in the curriculum are.

As Ranger Nick reminded his students, everybody is a teacher and everybody is a leader. Even if you aren’t planning on being a teacher, being able to teach others about a topic is an important skill to have.

Electrofishing!

By: Marlene Jocke, Warnell Outreach Intern & Student Ambassador

Hello! My name is Marlene Jocke, and I am the Warnell Outreach Intern for this summer! As a Wildlife Science major in Warnell, it’s always an amazing opportunity to have the chance to help professors with surveys or field experience when offered. Earlier this summer, several other UGA students and I helped Dr. Robert Bringolf assess a UGA alumni’s pond north of Athens. For this assessment, we were evaluating the health of the pond by looking at the number and sizes of the fish species in the pond. This meant that we’d be catching fish to measure and weigh using electrofishing and seining techniques. If you don’t know what electrofishing and seining are, they are two ways biologists assessing a body of water can catch fish (fishing the old-fashioned way would take way too long).

Electrofishing can be done in two ways: on a boat or by standing in the water. For our assessment, we were electrofishing on a boat. There is a generator attached to two poles that stretch over the side of the boat and dangle above the water. At the end of the poles, they form a ring with metal wires that dip down into the water. Electric currents get sent out into the water via the wires, temporarily immobilizing fish in the immediate area (make sure you don’t touch the water or you will get shocked!).

With seining, you drag a long net through the water with two people holding poles on either side (you want to keep the net perpendicular with the shore, so one person is in deeper water while the other is along the shore). There are weights on the bottom of the net that drag along the bottom and floats on the top of the net to keep fish from escaping (we don’t want that).

I’ve only been electrofishing once in my Wildlife Science class with Dr. Cyndi Carter, and while I knew some fish identification, they were mainly of specimens preserved in jars and bleached of color, so this volunteer experience gave me a chance to build on what I already knew.

Most ponds in Georgia are man-made, and this pond was no exception. When the first run-through of seining was done, we had over a hundred small fish wriggling among the netting and pond muck we picked up. Before this, I just called every small fish a minnow or a mosquitofish (I know, not very wildlife-major of me, but Dr. Bringolf taught us how to tell the difference between the bluegill and the largemouth bass juveniles.

One thing I learned about seining is that when the bottom of the net gets stuck from sand/ silt/ pond muck, it is a pain to pull along. Oh, and add that with actively sinking in a muddy bank, you end up moving at a snail’s pace. We had to have two people on either side of the net to bring the net to shore. Ignoring the fact that we had mud plastered on our legs, (none of us lost our shoes! Hooray!) and I could feel mud inside my shoes (wearing closed toed shoes has its pros and cons in situations like this), we managed to catch over hundreds of juveniles and one or two medium-sized largemouth bass and bluegill. We also ended up with some fat tadpoles and a baby pond slider in our net.

With electrofishing, it feels a bit like playing a carnival game. You have to be quick with the net. The fish do get stunned by the charge in the water; but only for a matter of seconds. It’s always a little annoying when you see a stunned fish in the water, but your net can’t reach it (and if you have a shorter net, this happens a lot). And when electrofishing, it’s not all fish that you catch. One of the teams on the boat ended up catching a painted turtle in one of their nets.

Of all the fish we were able to catch, weigh, and measure; we ended up with mostly large bluegills and tiny juveniles (which were also mostly bluegills). There were barely any intermediate-sized bluegills. This means that this pond is unbalanced and not in good shape. The absence of medium-sized fish means that they are all getting eaten by the predators, especially largemouth bass. This creates a feedback loop. With no medium-sized fish to eat, the bass are stunted in their growth but continue to reproduce.  This means even more mouths to feed, and the spiral continues.  

From what Dr. Bringolf told us, this happens frequently in southern ponds, and if pond owners want to grow bigger bass, they need to do some active management like removing some of the small (stunted) bass and/or adding more small fish for the bass to eat.  Bluegills are a great food source for bass, but threadfin shad can add another good option.  The water level in the pond we sampled was about 5’ below normal level, so the owner will probably need to check for leaks before doing anything else with the fish community. 

All in all, it was a pretty fun day being outside, and helping with Dr. Bringolf was an amazing experience to implement what I’ve learned in my classes and put it out into a real situation. If you’re interested in learning to fish, come visit the Angler Outreach page on the Warnell Outreach website!

Day in the Life at Warnell

A typical day in Warnell is always busy! My day kicked off with a Vertebrate Natural History lecture with Dr. Castleberry, where we discussed mammalian anatomy as part of our last unit before finals came around the corner. After writing down all of my lecture notes, I headed to the lab where I could examine mammal specimens to better visualize the species we are supposed to learn. One of the things I like about the Warnell labs is how accessible specimens of multiple species are of various sizes, which tremendously helps us visualize what encountering a particular animal in the wild would look like. Today’s goal for me was to try to memorize various mammalian skulls, as it can get very chaotic trying to differentiate them! On this particular day I wanted to focus on rodent skulls and differentiating between various species of mice, squirrels, beavers, and more. After I was done examining all the specimens, I headed to an ambassador event with my fellow ambassador Everett. Today’s event was the Sporting Clays Tournament for Warnell Weekend at the Elbert County Gun Club. I had never been to a gun club before, so this was a very new experience for me, and I was not sure what to expect. Once we got there, we drove around a golf cart to deliver snacks and water to our fellow Warnellians and alumni that were shooting. After delivering refreshments, we were taught how to tally scores and spent some time counting everyone’s totals. Some people put up some very impressive numbers; I remember seeing quite a few 93s and a 95! After we submitted our tallies, we started recording attendance for the incoming afternoon batch before lunch. During lunch, I had a great opportunity to connect with alumni working in multiple natural resource companies and also network with more Warnell students across multiple programs. I enjoyed my time at the gun club. Driving the golf cart around was my favorite part, and it was also very impressive to see how accurate the shooters were. After mine and Everett’s shift, we drove an hour back to Athens where I did some work in the Warnell lounge with my peers to prepare for the upcoming Vert lab exam and then went to the turtle pond to say hello to our beautiful pond sliders. After a long day, I finally went home and cooked some pasta for dinner. Since it was a Friday, I had some friends come over and we watched a movie to end the day off.  

– Arya Rane, Warnell Student Ambassador

Adventures in Herpetology: A Trip to Jekyll Island

By: Cianna Kicklighter 

For the culminating field trip of the Herpetology class taught by Dr. Cynthia Carter, we had the opportunity to go to Jekyll Island to seine for diamondback terrapins. This trip was unlike any other I’ve ever been on, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. The trip began on Friday, April 17 when we took vans down to our campsite on Jekyll Island, where Dr. Maerz and his team had arrived earlier. The sand gnats or “no-see-ums” definitely made the first night of camping…interesting to say the least, but we still started bright and early the next morning with some herping around the island. We were lucky enough to get to see some of the Diamondback rattlesnakes that our TA, Michael Brennan, is working with. This also gave us a chance to witness radio telemetry in action, and we were able to see glass lizards and racerunners on the way. 

That afternoon, we got our first experience seining in the brackish creeks the terrapins call home. Seining is a lot of things: muddy, wet, strenuous, and involved, to name a few. Above all of that though, it was a blast. You immediately get neck deep in brackish water and covered in mud, before forming human chains to pull the large nets used to catch the terrapins. As you pull the nets through the water, you can see the terrapins peak out of the water, which makes the excitement continue to build until you pull aside to check the nets. Seining requires a lot of focused teamwork, and really strengthens bonds with fellow classmates. That is to say: friends who seine together, stay together! 

Of course, it’s not just terrapins that you catch. We caught gar, flounder, and 3 different kinds of sharks (all of which were quickly released back, and not loaded up like the turtles). After a few hours, the tide starts to come in, which was our signal to load up our terrapins and head back to the visitor center to meet with the researchers from the Georgia Sea Turtle Center. We then took all kinds of measurements and collected data on each terrapin, as well as giving each unmarked individual a pit tag and marking. All of this information is stored for research with the Georgia Sea Turtle Center and UGA before the turtles are released back to their creeks. It was truly amazing to get to contribute to such important, ongoing research. After a much needed ice cream break, it was back to the campsite for bed. 

The next day we did it all over again, with the addition of a behind the scenes tour of the Sea Turtle Center. It was a long day, but the amazing teachers, TA’s, and peers that I went with made every moment feel refreshing and special. Even as we swam back to the van after hours of seining, me and my classmates sang songs together and laughed. Energy wasn’t ever in short supply despite how involved of a process it is. After taking our measurements for the second day, we loaded up and started the drive back to Athens. Despite the belief that everyone (but the driver) would sleep on the ride home (considering it started around 10 pm), we ended up talking and laughing the whole way back. I remember pulling into Whitehall at 4 am and wishing that I had just one more hour with everyone. 

Despite how physically tiring the whirlwind of a weekend was, I can honestly say that it was one of the most rejuvenating and rewarding experiences that I have ever had. After a good 11 hours of sleep, I truly felt so de-stressed and so giddy. I realized very quickly that 1. I couldn’t stop talking about it and 2. it was just what I needed. This trip was everything you could ask for—educational, full of new experiences, fun, refreshing, and memorable. I can not applaud Dr. Carter, Dr. Maerz, and all of the TA’s/graduate students enough for all they did to make this such a meaningful trip. All I can say is this: If anyone ever asks you to go seining for terrapins, say YES (just make sure to bring clothes you don’t like). 

Senior Thesis Adventures

The ideal weather for terrestrial salamanders in the southern Appalachians is cool, wet, and damp. Not only that, but these animals are also nocturnal. As such, on a typical Saturday night in October of 2025, I was very likely to be found not in Athens, celebrating another bulldog football win, but traversing cold, rainy mountain roads at Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in Otto, North Carolina.

The view from the Forest Service dorms at Coweeta

As a senior thesis student in the Maerz Herpetology Lab, I am studying the dispersal patterns of hybrid Plethodon salamanders. As this genus is direct-developing, they lack an aquatic larval stage – which is quite unique among amphibians. Basically what this means is that, unlike your typical frog, which may live out the first part of its life as a tadpole in a pond, these guys hatch out of eggs as fully developed, juvenile salamanders!

A juvenile salamander on a leaf

Aside from being really cute and small, they are a super cool genus to study. A typical day in the field for me, went a little something like this… At around 5 p.m., I loaded my gear, my volunteers, and myself into one of Warnell’s many field trucks, and began the 1.5 hour drive up to Coweeta. On the way, I often stopped for coffee at Tallulah 1882, a local coffee shop in Tallulah Falls, GA, in order to fuel me for what would certainly be a long night.

Typically, we made it to Coweeta around sunset, and the views as we drove towards the mountains were simply breathtaking. After 20 or so minutes of driving on rough, dirt roads, we made it to our field site, by which point the sun was gone, and it was prime salamander time. The surveys themselves were fairly straightforward: walk through the forest looking for salamanders. Unfortunately for us, this was a bit more difficult than it seemed, especially if it was raining. Many a night was spent huddled in rain gear, trying to catch and measure a slimy, squirmy salamander while trying to input data on an iPhone in a bulky, waterproof case.

Selfie with a salamander on a very rainy night

Despite all that, I typically had a blast. There was nothing better than getting to handle and interact with such cool (and adorable) animals, all the while contributing to my professional and educational journey, AND hanging out with friends and labmates.

“As I reflect on my senior year, I miss the nights I was able to spend out in the field, even if it meant driving back to Athens at 3 a.m., sleep deprived and amped up on caffeine. One of the best parts about Warnell is the opportunities available to you as a student to get involved and do what you love. For me, that meant spending my weekends in the mountains, but there are so many ways to grow as a student, and person, as a Warnellian.” – Erin Monroe, Warnell Student Ambassador

Club Feature: Herpetology Herping Trip

Herpetology Club

The past two semester at Warnell I have participated in herping at Whitehall Forest with the Herpetology Club.

Herping is a hobby that consists of searching for wild amphibians and reptiles. The first time I went herping with the club, I learned a lot of information about the animals that I was currently studying in Vertebrate Natural History. We were able to find and handle multiple paedomorphic mole salamanders. The opportunity to hold a live mole salamander in my hands expanded my appreciation and interest in working with amphibians and reptiles.

More recently, I joined the Herp Club on their trip out to Whitehall to go herping again. I brought a few friends from ecology with me, and we were all very satisfied with our experience. We captured multiple Eastern Red Newts; some were adults, while most were efts. We also found a baby stinkpot turtle, which was absolutely adorable. Through these adventures with the Herp Club, I have formed closer relationships with my friends at Warnell as we bond over the shared experience of appreciating wildlife. I had a goal of catching a bullfrog, and I was successful, which made me very happy. 

Overall, I am exceedingly pleased with the opportunities that I have access to here at Warnell. One of my favorite parts of every tour I give to prospective students is stopping by the Maerz Herp Lab. I love introducing our guests to the animals that are cared for by Warnell, as they are always intrigued by the diversity of species that are housed at the lab. I enjoy sharing fun facts about the animals as well for example, the gopher frog, which is listed as near threatened on the IUCN Red List, gets its name from sharing a home with the gopher tortoise. 

“It was super fun to catch critters with fellow students and attempt to identify them together. “

— Lili Varma, Student Ambassador 2025-2026

A Birthday in the Wild: Study Abroad Adventures

I never had a 21st Birthday.

To be more specific, I had about 30 minutes of a birthday before our plane to Auckland, New Zealand, crossed the international date line.

Want to learn more about Study Abroad?

Upon landing, though it was still May 12th for my family back home, the day had come and gone for me, and I was thrown into the absolute whirlwind that was Warnell’s Animal Behavior Maymester.
With no time to rest, we hopped on a bus bound for an animal sanctuary. On the way, I sat by
the one person I even remotely knew on that trip: Bri Davis, a fellow Warnellian I’d shared a
class with over a year earlier. Excited and nervous, the two of us became fast friends, and we
explored the sanctuary together along with a few other students. There, we met many of New
Zealand’s most iconic bird species, from Kiwis to Wekas to the immensely curious Kea, the
world’s only alpine parrot. This last species was my personal favorite, as we were allowed to
interact with the birds and observe their intelligence for ourselves (one decided to make it his
mission to untie my shoelaces). Later, we even got to see one in the wild!

Over the next few days, we continued to meet some amazing species, and I loved being able to observe them and apply some of the animal behavior concepts we were learning in class. We swam with dolphins in the freezing cold waters of the South Pacific and hiked within just a few
feet of basking fur seals.

It wasn’t all cute animals and hiking, however. Animal Behavior is not an easy course, and our
long bus rides across New Zealand’s South Island were spent listening to lectures and reading
scientific journal articles. Bri and I sat in the back, sharing headphones and listening to Dr.
Maerz explained proximate vs ultimate causes of behavior as we passed through landscapes used
to depict Gondor and Rohan in The Lord of the Rings.

A personal favorite stop of mine was Aoraki, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. A long hike
culminated in a class-wide polar plunge at the mountain’s glacial lake, where icebergs break off
the Tasman glacier and float towards shore. It was there that I took the above photo, which
won me a GoPro in UGA’s annual Study Away photo contest. It was a surreal experience to see a glacier melting like that in real time, and I spent most of the hour we had there snapping
photos and enjoying the view.

The rest of our time in New Zealand was spent enjoying the city of Queenstown, where I had
the best bowl of ramen of my life, and exploring Fiordland National Park, where we climbed a 50
foot waterfall. When we finally departed, though I was sad to leave such a beautiful country
behind, I was excited to see what new adventures Australia would hold.

I was not disappointed. On our first stop, Carnarvon Gorge, I got up close and personal with a kangaroo and her joey, and we were lucky enough to see not 1, but 2 platypi! I spent nearly an hour just sitting there, a few feet from the kangaroos, watching them play.

One of the highlights of the trip was definitely our last stop – Lady Elliot Island, a private
eco-resort on the Great Barrier Reef. There, we spent our days swimming with sea turtles and
manta rays, and eating some of the most delicious food, cooked for us by a gourmet chef.

A nesting Red-Tailed Tropic Bird on Lady Elliot Island

I will never forget the nights I spent singing karaoke with them in Queenstown, stargazing in
Australia, or talking philosophy on the beaches of Lady Elliot. The course itself, Animal
Behavior is one of my favorites I’ve taken in college, and that, coupled with such an amazing
trip, made this my all-time favorite experience as a Warnell student, one well worth missing my
birthday for.

“Aside from the amazing experiences, I also met so many wonderful friends on that trip.”

— Erin Monroe, Student Ambassador 2025-2026

Faculty Feature: Daniel Johnson

This semester, I had the privilege of taking Dendrology and having the lab section led by Dr. Daniel Johnson. Dendrology was so much fun and so informational, thanks to Dr. Dan and his clear passion for the subject. This passion and his care for us made me want to do my best.
We learned how to identify well over 100 trees, often without flowers or fruit, and sometimes even without leaves. While this was often not easy, Dr. Dan supported us both in and outside of
class and created a learning environment that fostered growth.

Dr. Dan always walks into both the lecture and the lab with a smile, and he has a positive attitude
every day. His positivity brightens his students’ days and makes class very enjoyable. He also
demonstrates a commendable amount of care for his students and our learning. It is evident that
he wants us to succeed, to learn, and to do our best; knowing that he cares so much about us
doing well means a lot. His class consisted primarily of lectures, which included everything you
would want to know about trees in North America. In the lab, he (or a TA, for other lab sections)
led us on walks around campus, Whitehall forest, the Botanical Gardens, and Oconee Forest
Park, in which he showed us how to identify trees in person.

In my opinion, he was superb at explaining how to identify the trees while also teaching
us about their structures, what they need to grow, and how they fit into their individual niches.
He was also very responsive to questions and was more than willing to re-explain anything we
needed. It was clear at times that he wanted to challenge us, while also taking the time to
frequently review harder species to give us the tools we needed to succeed. Through the
challenges of the semester, we were still able to joke and have fun in his lab section.

Because of his instruction, I am now able to identify most trees anywhere I go, which allows me to inform family and friends about the world around us. He is a great example of how important
passion is in teaching and how important it is to care for your students. He demonstrates compassion,
knowledge, and kindness that are extremely beneficial to the college experience and, more
specifically, the Warnell experience.

“Dr. Dan is a very positive and important part of life here at Warnell.”

— Cianna Kicklighter 2025-2026 Warnell Student Ambassador

Warnell Course Spotlight: Dendrology

It’s never ‘just a class’ in Warnell. As students progress through their college career, many of them will be required to take major-mandated classes to satisfy the requirements for their degree. Personally, I am pursuing a degree in BSFR Fisheries and Wildlife, but my major requires me to take a dendrology class, which is the study of trees. My primary interests heading into college had always been studying animals, so I viewed this class just as a mere hurdle I had to get through to graduate, and I couldn’t have underestimated it more. 

On the first day of class, my instructor, Dr. Daniel Johnson, told all of the students that he was aware that some of us may have taken this class expecting to just clear off a long list of things to graduate, and he was confident that he could change our views by the end of the course. After listening to this, as I started to learn more about dendrology, I also started to be more subconsciously aware of my environment to an entirely new degree. When walking on campus, I would not look twice when walking along any planted trees, and now, I can look and identify the trees I walk next to on the way to class every day. “This one is a longleaf pine…and this one is a river birch,” I would say to myself as I passed the trees. Using the knowledge learned about various tree species, I could also apply it towards other classes, such as wildlife habitat, and discuss the role of trees in the context of wildlife. Every Thursday, we would learn new tree species in the lab section of this course and reinforce our learning by observing how these species presented themselves with all of their natural variations in the wild. This provides us invaluable training on recognizing species in the field where many Warnell graduates will be expected to work, honing career-defining skills. 

As I write about my experiences in dendrology when this course draws to a close in the 2025 fall semester, the biggest takeaway I would tell myself is to know that keeping an open mind will get you far in education and help you cultivate new interests that you previously did not see yourself indulging in. The dendrology course offered in Warnell has directly made me more aware of my surrounding environment and has taught me skills that can be applied in a variety of locations and contexts. Most importantly, this class provides priceless development of career skills by constantly employing a hands-on interactive approach to go out in the woods every week and observe the peculiarities of so many different tree species that occur in Georgia. Learning new, valuable skills and cultivating new interests is what makes me say that it is never ‘just a class’ in Warnell, and that this school serves to uplift its students by exposing them to various approaches of navigating the field of natural resources.

Here is what I saw at a review walk during the Dendrology lab! We learned how to distinguish tree species in the fall season. 

You can learn more about Dendrology and other courses, here

Thanks for reading

-Student Ambassador Arya Rane

Wildlife Disease Research at Warnell

By: Emily Stachowski

I have had ample opportunity since being a student in Warnell, including becoming a volunteer at the Deer Research Barn, becoming a Warnell student ambassador, and conducting my senior thesis in sea turtle genetics. My favorite opportunity arose after taking Dr. Yabsley’s wildlife diseases class. I found my love for wildlife health and managing disease. I became interested in trying to work at the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study (S.C.W.D.S.) where Dr. Yabsley works.I went to a Warnell networking event where I met a graduate student that had Dr. Yabsley as her advisor.

We talked about how I have always wanted to be a vet and how I was interested in pathology and infectious disease. She introduced me to Dr. Goodwin who is a veterinary pathologist finishing her PhD with assistance from one of the labs at SCWDS. Dr. Goodwin quickly took me under her wing and now we meet once a month to review pathology cases. I asked her about SCWDS during one of our meetings and she helped me find a lab I would be happy in. Now I work at SCWDS in Dr. Mead’s lab testing mosquitoes for West Nile Virus and other mosquito born viruses. I enjoy my work in the lab, and I am beyond grateful for this opportunity!