2008 Woodie Awards
Polar bears, binge-drinking rats enlighten UAA researchers
Sam Dunham
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College has long been associated with drinking alcohol, but at UAA, students aren't the only ones consuming the stuff.
Every day, dozens of rats are getting buzzed in the name of science. Studying the effects of binge drinking on rats is one of the experiments conducted by faculty and students in the psychology department. Each semester, both faculty and students conduct experiments ranging from surveys about sexuality to observing polar bears' reactions to seal-shaped ice cubes.
Eric Murphy, an assistant professor of psychology, conducts rat research aiming to create an animal model of binge drinking. For a 30-minute period each day, the rats can drink all they want of a solution of grain alcohol diluted to 20 proof, about the same potency as wine. Normally the rats imbibe the equivalent of a college student drinking three to six drinks in a half-hour.
"I think from the rat's perspective, it's like winning the lottery," Murphy said.
Murphy, who published his finding in the Journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology in 2005, said it's not a study of alcohol addiction. He instead compared it to a college student's binge drinking patterns.
"(The rats) don't show any - physical withdrawal symptoms, so we can't really say that they are physically addicted," Murphy said. "It's drinking to get drunk.
The rats push a lever that releases alcohol most often in the first few minutes, and then drink progressively less as the experiment continues. However, if a buzzer is sounded midway through the experiment, Murphy found a small spike in how much the rats drink. Murphy's conclusion is that unexpected stimuli lead to more drinking.
If the same principle holds true for humans, then environments such as bars and clubs, where something like a song or a friend calling for another round, could trigger a desire to drink more, Murphy said.
"People who are trying to regulate their alcohol consumption should probably try to avoid unpredictable stimuli in their environment," Murphy said.
This goes against traditional treatment of alcohol abuse, which advises people to avoid a constant environment when drinking. Another possibility is the experiment does not apply to humans at all. Murphy said no conclusions about people could be formed from the experiment.
"I don't want to go too far and generalize with humans, because this is only a rat," he said.
When the rats are no longer needed in the experiment, they are donated to the biology department or to predatory birds at the Alaska Zoo.
Donating beer-bellied rats is not the only contact the psychology department has with the Alaska Zoo. Gwen Lupfer-Johnson works with resident polar bear Aphun, focusing on environmental enrichment.
"It enhances the well-being of captive animals, especially large predators like polar bears that in nature would range over such a wide area," she said.
Because polar bears are very exclusive predators, living almost entirely off seals, Lupfer-Johnson wanted to see if they had an instinct to respond to the shape of their natural food. Aphun has been in captivity since she was 2 months old, and Lupfer-Johnson said the bear has likely never seen a seal in her life. Instead, Lupfer-Johnson freezes a block of ice in a seal-shaped mold
"We can't give her seal, but we can give her what looks like a seal," she said.
Many zoos give their polar bears blocks of ice with fish frozen inside, but Lupfer-Johnson said she thinks this is the first time a zoo has used ice in the shape of the bears' prey. Aphun is also given large cubes of ice.
Lupfer-Johnson said Aphun spends significantly more time with the seal-shaped blocks, even going as far as to demonstrate predatory behaviors typical in wild polar bears, despite the fact she has spent most of her life in captivity. Lupfer-Johnson said it all suggests that Aphun knows what her food is supposed to look like and how it is supposed to act instinctually.
"It's a little more enriching than just throwing fish in a bucket," Lupfer-Johnson said. "It makes me feel good to do research that promotes an animal's welfare."
Lupfer-Johnson also teaches the research methods classes, where she helps students learn how to conduct experiments.
"There is a wide variety of projects that my students worked on last semester," she said.
While students are generally limited to surveys for their experiments, their topics can still be interesting and pertinent. Lupfer-Johnson said one of her favorite student experiments studied the effects of divorce and parental supervision on adolescent promiscuity. Another student experiment measured the relationship of the length of a person's fingers to their exposure to prenatal sex hormones, which was also found to be related to sexual orientation. Vicki Wesolowski, who also teaches research methods, said she is currently helping students with an experiment studying competitiveness in women when exposed to different male archetypes.
Most student experiments gather data solely through surveys, according to Wesolowski, with the occasional experiment measuring simple physiological reactions such as blood pressure and heart rate. But facilities at UAA are not equipped to conduct very elaborate experiments
"Our facilities don't support that a whole lot, so the easiest this to do is a survey," Wesolowski said. "If we had better lab facilities, we could expand the types of research we did."
Wesolowski said the department is always asking for more room to expand the scope of its research. Presently, partly due to the CAS budget deficit, expansion is very difficult. Regardless, the staff and the students of the psychology department continue to practice their discipline and make strides that will eventually be felt by society at large.
"I think for most people that's the end goal, that the results from rat experiments will eventually better the human condition," Murphy said.