Snakebit
Ph.D. student Berlynna Heres cut her research teeth on eastern diamondback rattlesnakes but arrived at UMaine to find out how American eels get along with dams
Long before going to graduate school at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, Berlynna Heres was drawn to the field of herpetology—from the Greek word “herpian” meaning “to creep.”
Snakes are among those creepy crawlies and are the ones that most captured Heres’ fancy. So to earn her master’s degree she ended up tracking, capturing, and surgically implanting radio devices in eastern diamondback rattlesnakes—the largest venomous snake in North America and reaching lengths of eight feet and weighing up to 10 pounds.
With her master’s in hand, she was poised to do similar work tracking and tagging timber rattlesnakes for a summer but turned that job down to accept her current position as a doctoral student working with professor Joseph Zydlewski of the UMaine Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology for a rather different—and a bit safer—line of work as part of the Mitchell Center-led Future of Dams project.