The ‘fly’ effect: Oles create an interactive exhibit on sound for young learners
This summer, visitors at the Great River Children’s Museum can explore an interactive exhibit on animal sounds thanks to the work of a team of St. Olaf College students.
Wyatt Gurgel ’28 and Mary Cate Pugh ’27 worked alongside Associate Professor of Biology and Director of Neuroscience Norman Lee to bring the new Sound Seekers exhibit to life. A collaboration between St. Cloud State University and the Great River Children’s Museum, Sound Seekers explores how animals use and produce sounds for communication within their own species, how scientists study animal sounds, and how intended and unintended listeners use such sounds for survival or to reproduce.
For Gurgel and Pugh, contributing to the exhibit offered an opportunity to bring their own academic and creative interests to a broader audience.
“My adviser kept joking that I was learning how to talk to animals,” says Gurgel, who is majoring in studio art, biology, and film and media studies. After taking the Topics in Animal Communication course with Lee, Gurgel gifted him a print of a grasshopper they painted. This print inspired Lee to invite Gurgel to bring an artistic perspective to the exhibit.
To help translate the science into visuals, Gurgel worked with Lee and other students on illustrating the exhibit’s mural. Together, they designed three posters that when combined become a mural, helping visitors visualize how animals hear and produce sound. Their work was informed by the research team; queue Pugh.
Pugh, a biology major with a neuroscience concentration, has worked in the Lee Lab since 2025. As part of the undergraduate research team, she has studied how a species of acoustic parasitoid flies recognize the calling songs of field crickets to identify suitable hosts for their developing larvae. For Sound Seekers, Pugh and other student researchers brainstormed aspects of the research that would work best for the exhibit.
“We were thinking, ‘How do we portray this in the most interesting and easy-to-understand way? How do we apply it for a larger audience?’” she explains. “We could have gone in a lot of different directions with the work. We really wanted to focus on sound because that is something kids can relate to.”
Pugh notes that studying the auditory system of a fly can seem like a niche area of research, but it raises much broader questions.
“It poses a lot of questions about the role of sound in our environment,” she says. “We want to get kids interested in science. It is awesome for kids to see science through exhibits like Sound Seekers because the information can be applied to answer a whole range of questions about our world.”
Gurgel agrees, noting that making scientific research accessible to a broader audience is an important part of the exhibit’s mission.
“So much of scientific research is presented in a niche way where only other scientists really understand it,” Gurgel says.
As Sound Seekers introduces young visitors to new ways of thinking about science, the project has also helped Gurgel and Pugh envision new possibilities for their own futures. For both Oles, the experience built on interests they developed at St. Olaf and helped clarify where those interests might lead.
Gurgel started drawing and painting bugs in high school. “I really love making paintings of bugs; it’s my favorite thing to paint. I do a lot of watercolor illustration, and I will make paintings for my friends,” they say. Their interests span both biology and art, and their experience with Sound Seekers has shown Gurgel new ways to combine the two.
“I realized that I could combine art and biology, and do scientific illustration,” they say. “I was really hopeful that I would be doing something like this when I was in high school, and I’m realizing that it wasn’t as crazy of a dream as I thought it was and that I really can accomplish it. I think that younger me would find it just so incredible that I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do.”
Pugh originally came to St. Olaf interested in majoring in psychology, before her coursework led her to biology and neuroscience. Through her student work in labs on campus, she has developed leadership skills she hopes to carry into her next phase of life –– graduate school.
“I would like to study the role of estrogen in the female brain, and how estrogen decline during menopause increases the risks for neurodegeneration when aging,” she explains. “I’m really fired up about the research gap in women’s brain health — there is a lot we still don’t understand. I would like to study how estrogen in the female brain and menopause affects neurodegeneration when aging.”
Curious minds can explore Sound Seekers at the Great River Children’s Museum through August 31.