IUPUC Associate Professor of Biology, Luke Jacobus, Ph.D., recently received a grant from the Indianapolis Zoo to study threatened or endangered mayfly species in Indiana. The grant is part of a $350,000 Zoo program to support conservation projects around the world.

Funds provided to IUPUC will support Jacobus’s “Monitoring Indiana’s Most Threatened Mayfly Species” program. The Zoo’s support helps to fund research and monitoring of the 12 state-threatened or state-endangered mayfly species that have not been found in Indiana for 50 years or more, including one species that has not been seen in 190 years.

With the funding, Jacobus will go on eleven collecting expeditions to search for the mayfly species in at least fifteen locations to evaluate current habitat conditions. The data derived from this study will be used to inform the state’s threatened and endangered species lists.

Bill Street, Senior Vice President of Conservation, Life Sciences and Education at the Zoo, said “These grants will help protect nature internationally and locally by working with the Indiana Wildlife Federation on Monarch Butterflies efforts and IUPUC on a mayflies program that works with endangered species here in Indiana.”

Jacobus emphasizes that “Thirty-seven species of mayflies are currently listed as threatened or endangered in Indiana. This project will help us know which species really are in trouble and which ones are thought to be scarce simply because nobody has looked in the right place at the right time.”

For more information about the mayfly research project, contact Luke Jacobus at lmjacobu@iupuc.edu.

Visit iupuc.edu/biology for more information about IUPUC’s biology program.