Join Sammi Shimota and Giselle Ray as we discuss wildlife research reports and talk about its relevance to today's issues and its implications for our future.
Recorded last March, Sammi and Giselle talk about the history of coyotes in America, how they are managed in today's world, and how we can coexist with them.
7 Mar 2023
Bighorn Sheep Respiratory Disease with Sidney Brenkus
In this episode Giselle and Sammi interview Sidney Brenkus about her research project on bighorn sheep respiratory disease.
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26 May 2022
The Decline of the Monarch Butterfly: How a Warming Climate is Affecting Our Insects
Hosts Sammi and Giselle discuss a new paper by Dr. Erin Zylstra et. al. titled "Changes in climate drive recent monarch butterfly dynamics." We look at the three hypotheses identified in this paper for a reason why the monarch butterfly population is in decline. Sammi touches on various monarch butterfly topics and discusses her experience working on monarch butterfly research projects.
9 Apr 2022
White Hares in a Brown Forest: Climate Change Causes Camouflage Mismatch
Join your hosts Sammi Shimota and Giselle Ray, along with guest Frankie Garland as we discuss how climate change is altering the snowshoe hare's habitat from the paper "Camouflage mismatch in seasonal coat color due to decreased snow duration" by L. Scott Mills, Marketa Zimova, Jared Oyler, Steven Running, John T. Abatzoglou, and Paul M. Lukacs, Published in PNAS. We also discuss some findings from the paper "Geographic variations in winter adaptations of snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) by L.C. Giloitti, D.R. Diefenbach, and M.J. Sheriff. Special thanks to Dr. Marketa ZImova for answering some of our questions about molting!
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Terminology discussed:
-Phenology: “the timing of events during the year, in environments where seasonal changes occur” Some examples include the timing of hibernation and mating.
-Phenotype: observable traits of an individual. Examples: hair color, eye color
-Polyphenism: describes the variation for different phenotypes that can arise from a certain gene based on different environmental conditions. An example of this is the sex of sea turtles determined by environmental temperature.
-Phenotypic plasticity: the ability of an organism to change in response to stimuli in the environment. The change can be in their behavior, how they look, or even the animal’s size. In ecology there’s Bergmann’s Rule, a phenomenon in regard to an animal’s body size. White tailed deer, for example, on average have a smaller mass the further south you go towards the equator. This is thought to be because it takes less energy to cool a smaller body.
-Fitness: The ability of an individual to produce viable offspring relative to others of the same species or in other words an animal’s success at surviving and reproducing in comparison to those of the same species.
5 Feb 2022
How Wolves Alter Boreal Forests by Preying on Ecosystem Engineers
Sammi and Giselle discuss a recent paper by Thomas Gable et. al. called "Outsized effect of predation: Wolves alter wetland creation and recolonization by killing ecosystem engineers." To see the graphs and figures that go along with this paper, visit our Instagram @followingthetracks or visit the paper link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abc5439 (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abc5439)
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