At a Snail's Pace

As many members her class were frantically working on their senior projects, Amanda Franks proceeded at a snail's pace.

The senior biology major adapted a science experiment that tests how snails interact with common chemicals. By simplifying the original experiment created by Biology Professor Ernest Williams, she made it applicable for middle school and high school curricula.

Franks, who hopes to teach science at the middle-school level, worked with the new Program in Public Discourse to develop the classroom lesson, integrate it into a full unit of study and make the project appropriate for different age groups. She took the project into high schools and middle schools last spring.

To test the project, five advanced placement biology students from Oriskany High School took part in an interactive lab experiment at Hamilton last fall. Led by Franks and Williams, the students were divided into two groups, one with a nicotine solution and a colored-water control solution; the other with a caffeine solution and a colored-water control solution. The students dipped small pieces of lettuce leaves in one of the two substances and placed the leaves in a petri dish, allowing snails to eat whichever leaves they pleased. The students were unaware of which solutions were water and which were caffeine or nicotine.

The results of the experiment proved that the snails clearly favored the leaves dipped in colored water. Franks explained that toxic chemicals such as caffeine and nicotine exist naturally to keep predators, like caterpillars, from eating the plants' leaves.

As the experiment originally existed, the solutions were mixed using pure nicotine or caffeine, both of which can be fatal to humans in intense concentrations. Instead, Franks used cigarette butts soaked in water to reproduce a safer and more cost-efficient experiment that can be used in high schools and middle schools. To further simplify the test, she replaced the lettuce leaves with carnations. Because certain flowers can soak up color and chemicals in their water supply, they can be prepared in advance to save time in the experiment while not compromising results.