Testimonials

Seth Carbonneau '05   

If you looked in Seth Carbonneau's freezer this year, you'd find not the frozen pizzas and ice cream cartons of a college student, but ants. Frozen ants. Five thousand of them.

Seth spent most of the summer of 2004 staring at ants, collecting ants, being stung by ants. His focus on ants stems from a lifelong fascination with biology, evolution, and the basic mechanisms through which change happens. It also comes from a recent compulsion to study the species which, he says, "make up an amazing amount of the biomass of earth. Ants are so well adapted that they can have a significant amount of environmental impact."

With fire ants marching up the coast of Maine, the study of ants has become even more important. Working with College of the Atlantic professors Helen Hess and Chris Petersen and with University of Maine professors Frank Drummond and Eleanor Groden, Seth designed a research model that looked at the connection between ant aggression and genealogy, wondering whether more closely related ants will be more protective toward each other.

"People like to think that humans are a pinnacle of evolution, that we are this amazing organism and there's nothing really as cool or as intelligent as humans," says Seth, whose neck and arms are tattooed with patterns as intricate as the passageways inside an anthill. "But what really started interesting me in ants is that they are so numerous and they have super-intelligent communications that we can't comprehend."

This spring and summer, Seth will be continuing his research with evolutionary biologist Eldridge Adams of the University of Connecticut, conducting statistical analyses of his findings. Ultimately, he hopes his work will help researchers discover the least toxic way of controlling the invasion of fire ants in Acadia National Park. He also hopes that he may be one of a very few undergraduates, from any school, who leave college with their names as first author of an original scientific paper.

Seth says he chose COA because though he expected to focus on biology, he didn't want to study it exclusively. "I want to be a lifelong learner," he says. "I want to go to school because I'm interested, I don't want to specialize at the age of nineteen. COA is totally the place for me to study." While here, he's studied energy politics, history, literature, writing, ceramics and music, purposefully expanding his interests. But science has always been his love, and at COA he's been able to leap ahead to a level most students only find in graduate school. "The best part is that I can move on from here and have serious conversations with graduate school professors in which I'm critiquing scientific papers, not just accepting everything I hear."