Kelydra volunteers with the Ohio River Islands Fish and Wildlife Group, is an eagle watcher for the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources and is the vice-president of the local Reptile Rescue and Aid Society. She would like to become a chemical engineer so that she "can find environ-mentally friendly chemicals to replace hazardous ones" used today.
Kelydra's grandmother is her mentor. "She taught me courage in the face of adversity, when she died of cancer," says Kelydra.
Kelydra began her project out of concern for the effect that pollution, namely endocrine-disruptive chemicals, has on the animal population of America's streams and rivers. Although steroids have been found to be biologically active in fish, little research has been done on the effects on invertebrates. Kelydra investigated the effect of estrogen, prednisone and hydrocortisone on the gender ratios, hatch rates and wing beat frequencies of exposed mosquitoes. She hypothesized that gonadally derived steroids would cause variations in gender ratios, hatch rates and wing beat frequencies in Cluicinae mosquitoes and that adrenally derived steroids would affect hatch rates but not gender ratios, as illustrated by a nonmonotonic dose-response curve.
Kelydra set up culture tanks, adding a minimum of 100 mixed small mosquito larvae and varying the concentrations of steroids from none to 500 parts per trillion. She then closely observed the hatch rates, gender ratios and wing beat frequencies under each steroid concentration. Kelydra's experiments prove her hypotheses, and her data on invertebrates demonstrate the U-shaped nonmonotonic dose-response curve as previously seen only in vertebrates. She concluded that the presence of endocrine-disruptive chemicals in U.S. streams and waters is having the same dangerous effects on invertebrates as on vertebrate populations.
