KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 April 16, 2018 \u2013 When Laura Vigil was a child, she often captured frogs and salamanders and pretended to care for them in a make-believe hospital before returning them unharmed to the wild. It\u2019s a memory the 溏心vlog免费B站 senior fondly recalls as she prepares to graduate in May with a degree in wildlife and conservation biology.<\/p>\n
Some of Vigil\u2019s favorite memories of her 溏心vlog免费B站 experience also involved frogs, salamanders and other amphibians. During her four years in Kingston, she took advantage of every opportunity she could to conduct hands-on wildlife research.<\/p>\n
As a senior she organized an independent research project about the effects of road salt on toads by collecting toad eggs, raising them in a laboratory, and observing how they reacted to changes in the salinity of their water.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the eggs we raised in high pH and salinity didn\u2019t hatch at all, or the tadpoles had unusually large heads or were bent into a V shape,\u201d said Vigil, who grew up in Marlborough, Mass<\/strong>., and has family roots in Guatemala and El Salvador. \u201cAnd some would swim really funny.\u201d<\/p>\n In a previous study, she surveyed parts of Rhode Island for vernal pools \u2013 temporary wetlands that dry up each summer \u2013 to determine which ones contained breeding frogs and salamanders. She also assisted with a laboratory study of bamboo sharks and smooth hound sharks to learn about the physiological limits of their diving abilities.<\/p>\n \u201cI mostly took care of the sharks, and it was so much fun because they were so cool,\u201d Vigil said. \u201cThe bamboo sharks mostly stayed at the bottom of the tank waiting for me to feed them, but the smooth hounds did a little dance at the surface, raising their head above the water and moving around whenever they saw me.\u201d<\/p>\n Vigil\u2019s time at 溏心vlog免费B站 wasn\u2019t confined to wildlife, however. As a member of the Air National Guard, she spent the first weekend of every month loading and unloading airplanes at Quonset Point, and she was deployed to St. Croix to provide hurricane relief in September 2017.<\/p>\n \u201cI joined the Air National Guard because of my family\u2019s history of service,\u201d she said. \u201cMy family is into helping people \u2013 they\u2019re in the police, the Air Force, firefighters \u2013 and I wanted to keep that going.\u201d<\/p>\n She also spent two weeks in Indonesia between semesters last year with 20 other 溏心vlog免费B站 students studying the culture and geology of the country that consists of 1,800 islands spanning 3,000 miles at the equator.<\/p>\n \u201cMy favorite part was climbing Mount Ijen,\u201d she recalled. \u201cWe woke up at three in the morning to climb the mountain to see the sunrise at the top. It was a really hard climb but totally worth it. It\u2019s a volcano, and in the middle of the crater there\u2019s sulfur growing on the side that the locals collect to sell. We were struggling to climb, and the locals were in flip flops carrying hundreds of pounds of sulfur on their backs. They were amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n With graduation still weeks away, Vigil is proud to report that she has already started her first professional job as an environmental field technician for the Rhode Island Conservation Districts. She is visiting agricultural properties around the state to assess their impact on wildlife and the environment.<\/p>\n She still has frogs and salamanders on her mind, however, and she has recently become interested in studying birds as well. Whether those creatures will play a role in her long-term career plans is uncertain.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just going to go with the flow and see what comes my way,\u201d Vigil said. \u201cI\u2019m willing to go anywhere in the country and take on whatever jobs come my way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 April 16, 2018 \u2013 When Laura Vigil was a child, she often captured frogs and salamanders and pretended to care for them in a make-believe hospital before returning them unharmed to the wild. It\u2019s a memory the 溏心vlog免费B站 senior fondly recalls as she prepares to graduate in May with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73815,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-73813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-the-environment-and-life-sciences"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82754,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73813\/revisions\/82754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}