For some students, learning is not enough. These students feel the call to take what they learn to the next level and apply it to something real, something that just might become their life’s work.
Such is the case of senior biology major Helen Plylar, an undergraduate researcher who is pursuing her passions of studying snakes.  Her project, titled “Visual Accommodation in Snakes,” tests whether or not non-venomous snakes accommodate their visual focus based on their environment.
“Basically, I’m looking at their visual systems and whether or not they accommodate their vision to focus above water and below water,” said Plylar. “What we’re doing is shining lights into their eyes and based on the pattern that the light shows on the camera, when we look back at the film, it shows whether or not their eyes were in focus or out of focus.”
Plylar does this by using photoretinoscopy and photokeratoscopy. The techniques involve shining lights into the eyes of snakes, recording the data and analyzing it to see if any change is occurring.
“I have to do photoretinoscopy, which is I shine infrared lights into their eyes at different eccentricities and measure the patterns that reflects off their eyes and back into the camera. That’s to determine if accommodation is taking place,” said Plylar. “The other thing we’re doing is radius of curvature, and we use photokeratoscopy to do that, and that’s basically you shine a circle of LEDs into the snake’s eye. Based on how that circle compares to the radius of a perfect sphere, that’s how we determine if the eye is being deformed at all.”
While it may sound easy, Plylar had to develop all the methods and techniques herself. Due to the limited amount of research done in this area of herpetology, the study of reptiles, there was not much to go off of.
“You might think you just get assigned a project and that’s it, but a lot of times you have to work out a lot of the methods,” said Plylar. “You can look at other research papers and look at their methods section, but a lot of the time you’re not using the same materials and stuff and it takes awhile.”
Plylar works under the guidance of Dr. Cliff Fontenot, herpetologist and instructor of biological sciences at Southeastern. One of Fontenot’s current research areas is the evolution of vision in snakes, an area that Plylar was interested in studying. She began working as Fontenot’s lab
assistant, and when he expressed interest in sponsoring an undergraduate researcher, Plylar took the opportunity.
While the work has taken time to develop and execute, the overall benefit of the project has kept Plylar focused.
“I’m supposed to spend 16 hours a week in the lab because I’m taking this as a class and it is four credit hours, and it translates to 16 hours of class time a week. I usually take 17 or more hours a semester. It’s taken a lot of juggling. I work here doing this on Fridays. I come in the afternoons and at night. You have to be really dedicated; it has to be something you want to do,” said Plylar. “It’s a really important study because it’s never really been done before. People aren’t really looking at these guys so much. There’s obviously been stuff done in pit vipers to look at their vision, but these guys are completely different.”
While there is still data analysis to be done and a report to be written on her findings, her work does not end after this semester is over. Plylar plans to continue this research project into graduate school, which she hopes to do at Southeastern.
“It’s kind of a wide open field. People aren’t doing much to look at these snakes,” said Plylar. “It’s just a very time consuming project. It’s not really something you want to pick up unless you want to make it your life’s work.”
Plylar has just finished data collection and is moving to the analysis portion of her project. As for the snakes, they will be released back into the wild now that the tests are done.
While most students wait until they graduate to take a step towards their careers, students like Plylar are using their four years as an undergraduate to do just that. Through undergraduate research, Plylar has seized the opportunity to work on something greater then the run-of-the-mill classroom experience.