In her first week at McGill in 2023, Simone Miklosi took part in a volunteer day at the Gault Nature Reserve, sharing her biology research with the public.
“I was stunned to know that McGill owned a nature reserve,” says Miklosi, who is studying aquatic communities for her doctoral research.
Miklosi was back at Gault this summer, only this time doing on-site research at the Reserve on Mont Saint-Hilaire, about 50 minutes from downtown Montreal.
A field station of McGill’s Faculty of Science, Gault is actively engaged with the community. Half of the reserve is accessible to the public, offering 25 kilometres of scenic hiking trails, while the other half is preserved. The entire Reserve embodies the scientific process, with one half serving as the experimental area and the other as the control, supporting a balance between public access and conservation.
One of four recipients of a 2024 Gault Research Award, Miklosi studied the impact of heat stress on fathead minnows, a fish species native to Quebec.
“I was really excited,” says Miklosi, of receiving a $6,000 award. For starters, “it meant that my research had good standing, and that people believed in it.”
Miklosi stayed at the Reserve for 16 days, living in a tiny chalet adjacent to her experiment site, and used the laboratory facilities at Gault. It was the first time she had conducted an experiment in the outdoors. “I was a little nervous, but the facilities are really well taken care of, and everyone who works there is super helpful,” she says. Not only was she able to run her experiment, but Miklosi says “it really helped grow my field experience as well as my experimental research skills.”
Working with a research partner – fellow PhD student Liz Weller – Miklosi made use of the Reserve’s Large Experimental Array of Ponds (LEAP). The cattle tank ‘ponds’ can be filled with water from Lac Hertel, situated near the base of the mountain.
For the project, they increased the water temperature in five heated tanks by 4 degrees Celsius, which is how much warmer the planet might be in 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Five unheated tanks held other minnows.
“Some genes can increase or decrease in expression in response to heat stress,” says Miklosi.
Examining fish RNA shows gene expression – and the RNA in their liver and gills is “where we really want to look because changes in biological processes induced by stress are more effectively reflected in the organs,” she explains. But that traditionally requires killing the fish, which means “we’re not able to study how heat stress impacts the most vulnerable fish populations because we can't risk removing fish from the environment.” Monitoring freshwater fish also takes a lot of time, effort and interaction with the species, she says.
Her research explores the potential for gleaning the same information about gene expression from water samples. That’s because as organisms move through the water, they shed genetic material – environmental nucleic acids that are either DNA or RNA. “With water sample collection, you can do it very quickly, you can do it on a much larger scale. You can involve citizen scientists.”
To date, only one published study has examined water versus tissue collection of RNA, Miklosi says. “There needs to be more evidence that we can recover gene expression from water and that it's representative of what we see in the tissue. The findings of this project provide further evidence that we could look at gene expression just from water and investigate how heat stress impacts more vulnerable communities.”
The relationship between sunlight and its inactivation of viruses
Gault has experienced a record year of use in 2024, with 40 research projects so far compared to 22 last year. And for the first time, it welcomed Engineering students to the site for a research project.
Gault launched the student research awards in 2018. They mainly use funds from their operating budget to support the student research awards, “because we just started our fundraising journey. We’re very new to this,” says associate director David Maneli.
“It’s a fantastic place to do field work,” says Maneli. “There’s not a lot of pristine forests in the south of Quebec. McGill made a commitment a long time ago of not only protecting the mountain but putting aside a preservation sector where there is very little human usage, which I think is unique in the south of Quebec.”
Greyson He, BEng’23, won a 2024 Gault Research Award for a project that involved simulating wastewater discharge into freshwater bodies and studying how – and to what degree – sunlight deactivates the pathogens.
He collaborated on the project with PhD candidate Yiding Wang. “When you do field work at Gault, you have to have a buddy,” notes He, a master of science student in civil engineering. The two graduate students are part of Professor Stephanie Loeb’s lab, which works on water quality safety and treatment technology.
“Imagine you had runoff from a farm or sewer overflow into a lake, and then somewhere downstream there's a beach that people use for recreation. We’re trying to understand how long it will take for the pathogens in that wastewater to be inactivated so that it's safe for the beach,” Loeb explains.
To make sure they didn’t introduce any pollutants into Lac Hertel, they tested various bags in the lab first. The students designed a floating platform and submersed dialysis bags containing small amounts of pathogens into the lake at different depths to simulate varying levels of sunlight.
After extensive preliminary experiments, the grad students stayed at the Reserve for five days in August, taking water samples every two hours from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. “because we're interested in the light’s ability to kill the bacteria,” says He. Bacteria can die off during the day due to sunlight but in some cases self-repair and replicate at night, he says.
“They found some really interesting results showing that there is significant pathogen repair, and that over each day, it takes longer and longer for the concentrations of bacteria to decrease,” says Loeb.
The beauty of the Gault research setting was not lost on He, who regularly hikes at the Reserve and wants to build a career in environmental preservation.
He had been doing research for several years and says you can wonder ‘am I doing anything useful?’
For He, receiving the Gault Research Award for the self-initiated project felt like a vote of confidence and encouragement to keep at it. “I’m recognized as an independent researcher, and then being able to pull funding and do something that I really am passionate about – in an environment that I really love…That was personally and academically rewarding for me.”