Author Archives: alan_k

RMBL

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I recently had the chance to visit one of the premier field research stations in the world, the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab. RMBL is located in the old town of Gothic above Crested Butte, Colorado, well over 9000 feet up in the Rockies. RMBL boasts one of the longest running sites for remote research in North America, and hosts a large number of researchers studying many different aspects of high elevation ecology.

We were there for the opening of their new research building, the Gothic Research Center. I had a personal connection to this event, as my uncle John helped fund the construction of this building in honor of my cousin Keith who passed away a few years ago. Keith had spent several summers as a field technician there, and RMBL became one of his favorite places. His interactions and experiences at RMBL led him to pursue graduate work in biology. We felt this was a great way to honor Keith’s memory, and were thrilled to hear how excited the research staff was to take advantage of the new building.

photo L. La Pointe

Looking for marmots among rocky outcroppings in meadows and slopes

The next morning, Dan Blumstein let us tag along so we could see more of the area around RMBL. Dan studies yellow-bellied marmots, and was checking various far flung colonies to see whether any marmots were inhabiting them this year. It was kind of a down year for the marmots, so some of the previously-inhabited areas were no longer inhabited. Dan is interested in the metapopulation dynamics- for example how long do these populations persist, and how often are these sites recolonized by new animals? (Dan is interested in a lot of other things too in the realms of evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and conservation, including sensor arrays, and we’ve actually collaborated on a paper that came out of an NSF-funded workshop that he organized.) Dan’s free program JWatcher is a very useful tool for quantifying behavior from video records of animal behavior.

Big News- Fall Teaching Gig

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I got some recent good news to share! This fall I’ll be teaching EVE 100, Introduction to Evolution, here at UC Davis. I’m very excited to take this on- in the years since arriving here I’ve only been able to teach individual one-off lectures in various courses. What a wonderful opportunity to get to teach this at a place like Davis, moreover in a department like Evolution and Ecology. EVE is traditionally ranked in the top 2 or 3 departments of its kind for research, and the professors take great pride in their teaching (many win very exclusive campus-wide teaching awards). I know from my years here how bright and motivated some of the students are. Should be a fun (but busy!) fall.

 

Sonation Station

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A male sage-grouse "plucks" rows of specialized feathers to make sound

We care a lot about the sounds that sage-grouse make here in the Patricelli lab. Much of our effort has been in understanding how males make the bizarre collection of noises they use on the lek, what do those sounds mean for females, and how do human noise impacts affect wildlife. Among the sounds we’ve become increasingly interested in are the “swish” notes that introduce the rest of the display. These notes are made by the male rubbing his wings against specialized breast feathers, creating sounds that is reminiscent of walking in noisy corduroy pants. Looking at the spectrogram on the computer, the swishes are fairly broadband, but with surprisingly concentrated and variable frequency structure within the broadband noise. You can hear this noise in some of our videos (for example: here, here, and here).

Sage-grouse certainly are not the only kind of animal to make noises by rubbing two parts of their body together, nor it turns out, even the only one to vary the frequency of these mechanically produced sonations. Natasha Mhatre and colleagues recently reported that tree crickets can adjust the resonance frequency of their chirping stridulations.Their wings have multiple natural vibrational modes, and the crickets have the ability to shift the frequency at which the wings are vibrating. This ability to adjust must make for a much more complicated courtship process, since females may not be able to use the simple rule “lower frequency = bigger, better male”.

Many bird species also make sounds with their feathers. One of our collaborators on our sage-grouse work, Kim Bostwick, a curator at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, also works on manakin species that make sounds by rubbing or hitting their wings together. It is a really interesting system, since the relationships between these birds are known, and it is possible to see how these really specialized behaviors and structures have evolved. She recently published on some of the skeletal specializations that these birds have. She is also putting together a really beautiful website that explains her work on these birds. I hope you will check it out: singingwings.org.

 

 

 

Noise Experiment Paper Finally Out!

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At long last (~18months after first submission), Jessica’s paper detailing the multi-year noise introduction experiment has finally been published. Those with institutional access to Conservation Biology can get it here. The paper compares maximum lek attendance of males and females at leks with and without experimentally introduced noise, and found that relatively modest and localized noise sources were enough to cause declines. Two types of noise were used- relatively constant drilling noise, and less predictable truck noise. Somewhat surprisingly, truck noise, although it was intermittent and had a much lower mean amplitude over long periods, was associated with higher declines than the drilling noise.

Having seen the truly Herculean effort it took Diane and Jessica to actually execute this study in the field, and knowing how important it is to have this paper out there while new sage-grouse management plans are being drafted, I’m super excited to see this finally in print. Congrats Jessica, Diane, and Gail!

Yellowstone Trip Report

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Grand Prismatic Hotsprings, Yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park really is an amazing place- and we were fortunate that it lay on the route from Lander to John Byers’ pronghorn study in western Montana. We were doubly fortunate in that our colleague, Stan Harter, could take a couple of days to show us around. Stan wrote about our trip in the Spring 2012  issue of the Wyoming chapter of The Wildlife Society (pages 8-10). One excerpt from our second evening in the park:

 

 

Sunset on the Lamar Valley was spent on an overlook toward the west end of the main valley. However, we weren’t looking west into the sunset, as the grandest scene in the land unfolded before us, with bison crossing the river, an osprey tending its nest in a high cottonwood, several elk prancing high-necked as if on high alert, more bison and pronghorn mingling about near a cluster of aspen near the river, and on a high ridge another grizzly that seemed larger than the bison which was actually closer to us.
After the sun’s last rays vanished over the western horizon into a cloudless night, we hastened back to the point where we had seen the Mollie’s wolves earlier. A memorable scene

Bison bulls bully full wolves.

unfolded from a seemingly lackluster situation. Twelve of the canids were stretched out in the grass just below the cached carcass in the trees, sleeping off their version of a Thanksgiving food coma. Boring, right!! Not so! After a few minutes of this, we nearly missed the best event ever! A big bull bison was feeding his way uphill into the sprawl of canine slumber, and as he approached, the wolves scrambled out of his way. It was as if the bison was telling them who was really boss. Then about 10 minutes later, another bull did the same thing – and yet another bull followed suit a bit later still. Each time the wolves would bed down again, only to be booted out by the bison!!

 

I’ve put a few photos up in a Flickr album, and will at some point hopefully merge in some from our last trip in 2010. You may think a hundred something photos hardly qualifies as “a few”, but given that I may have shot 50gb of pictures over our 3 day/2night stay in the park, I stand by that statement!