Maxima Gomez-Palmer ’26 talks researching ties between gut microbiome and feather coloration in Common Yellowthroats

Picture this: you’re in the middle of a dense forest, an artificial bird call playing on repeat, waiting for a bird to mistake a net for open air. Does that sound appealing? Now imagine yourself in a research lab, teaching yourself the complex coding language of R while using a spectrometer to measure the brightness of bird feather coloration. Not for you? Well, if you are Maxima Gomez-Palmer ’26, both sound like the perfect way to spend your summer.

While Gomez-Palmer describes her 10-week summer program with the University at Buffalo (SUNY) biology department as “a lab-heavy experience,” it began in a forest similar to the one previously described. Working with ornithologist Dr. Marcella Baiz and post-doc Dr. Alix Matthews, her work started with catching songbirds for Matthews’ post-doc project using mist nets to collect various physiological measurements and samples.

“You start by getting two tall poles, and you put each one up in the forest using stakes,” Gomez-Palmer said. “When you stretch them out, it’s a 20-foot-long net, which we mount in the shade so the birds can’t see it. You put it up and wait, with a speaker on the ground under the net playing the bird call over and over. The birds (hopefully) get deceived by the sound and fly into the middle.”

What some may find to be a tedious process, Gomez-Palmer found to be exciting, especially collecting data. 

“It was so cool learning how to extract them too, because the net is made of a very fine material,” she said.

Having already experienced working with birds in Spain last summer, she found that it was “exciting to do so again in this Buffalo program, traveling to the dense forests of central Pennsylvania during the first two weeks.” However, the next leg of her summer was monopolized by time spent in the lab, working with the collected Common Yellowthroat fecal and bib feather samples to study the “correlations between gut microbiome composition, bib size and feather reflectance, and mask size in Common Yellowthroats.”

But, why Common Yellowthroats?

“They’re very abundant in the Buffalo area, and there’s already some literature published on their gut microbiome composition,” Gomez-Palmer explained. “They’re also really cool, because they have this bright yellow throat patch with plumage that’s carotanoid-based, and, we’re thinking, the more diverse their gut microbiome, the brighter the feathers — and females like brighter bibs.”

However, to the naked eye, measuring the difference in these shades of yellow would be nearly impossible. To do so, Gomez-Palmer was tasked with learning how to operate the spectrometer or, as she affectionately calls it, “the spec.”

“It’s this machine that has a light probe,” she said, “which I can put on top of overlapping bib feathers on black cardstock to measure their reflectance, or how bright they are.”

This process was not the easiest, especially with no one in the lab knowing how to use this new device. So, she took to flying solo (pun intended).

“For weeks, I read all the literature on how to use the spec,” Gomez-Palmer said. “I locked myself in the spec room for several weeks and was just troubleshooting with a bunch of different fine-scale settings like strobe period, integration time, and all that. I kind of just taught myself how to use it, which was fascinating but kind of daunting.”

The next challenge Gomez-Palmer faced was learning how to use R effectively to analyze her data.

“There was a lot of statistical analysis, which was hard, as I had only taken one statistics course at Carleton,” Gomez-Palmer said. “First, I was wondering how I was going to quantify plumage coloration. Then, how am I going to analyze that using statistics? There was a lot of reading the literature on my own again, getting a little bit of help from my postdoc, and reading R manuals.”

In the end, it was all worth it, because the results astounded her lab and are now in the process of being published.

“After doing statistical analyses, I discovered that higher yellow bib feather brightness correlates with higher gut bacteria diversity,” Gomez-Palmer said. “Prior work has shown that females prefer males with brighter bibs, so by doing so, they may also be choosing males that have higher fitness, with a more diverse gut microbiome!”

Propelled by this fantastic discovery, Gomez-Palmer went on to present her findings at the campus-wide biology research symposium in Buffalo. As for her current projects, she is now in the process of editing the materials and methods section that she was selected to write for the lab’s research paper. In it, she details her work with the spec, tailored specifically for carotenoid-based plumage studies, with the goal of sharing the wealth of spec knowledge with the rest of the ornithological community. 

“Usually being published as an undergrad is pretty rare,” Gomez-Palmer said. “I jumped at the opportunity.”

And, of course, she is also the founder of Carleton Birders, Carleton’s only birding club, where she hosts ornithologists and leads bird walks. 

“Part of my role when I lead the walks is to pepper in fun facts,” she said. “People enjoy them and like telling them to their friends. Usually they are behavior-focused or physiology-focused. For example, [there are] a lot of woodpeckers around here. Their tongues are so long that they actually retract and spiral around their skull, and their tongue acts as a shock absorber when they peck at trees!”

Gomez-Palmer’s love for birds is contagious and continues to drive her as she juggles working on her vulture-focused senior thesis (“comps”) project, preparing her first-ever published paper, and applying to graduate school.

“Birds are just such charismatic little organisms,” she said. “I feel they’re very easy to love, and part of the reason I love studying birds is there’s so much data you can collect from them.”