CSULB Stankowich Lab: Behavioral Evolution

End of the year lab party at the LA Zoo on Thursday! Thanks to Director Beth Schaefer for the personal tour and arranging meetings with keepers!
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Our new study of mammalian predator learning about warning coloration in prey with Caitlin Fay and Dr. Julie Young from Utah State Univ where we trained coyotes to not attack spraying skunk models has been written up in National Geographic! If you hit a paywall and want to read it, let me know and I can send a pdf of the article.

Are predators born fearing skunks? New research is upending a long-held assumption that skunks’ black-and-white colors are what warn coyotes and other animals not to mess with them.

So excited for our new collaborative paper in Proccedings of the National Academy of Sciences with the Urban Wildlife Information Network on the effects of gentrification on wildlife! Gentrification occurs when less wealthy residents from under-served groups are displaced by educated, White, higher income residents in certain neighborhoods. We used camera trap data from 1000 sites in 23 cities over 3 years along with a measure of gentrification from US Census data to show that gentrified areas of eastern cities had 1-2 more species on average than non-gentrified areas (increased alpha diversity or species richness) and western cities had greater changes in community composition in gentrified areas (different species, beta diversity). So, the effects of gentrification extend to non-human animals and set up potential social inequities of reduced access to native urban wildlife. We must work to establish equitable urban environmental policies to avoid such dispossession in minoritized and marginalized communities! Thanks to Mason Fidino for leading this charge!

The Mammal Lab had a great time at our annual Halloween Pumpkin Carving Party on Friday afternoon! Thanks to everyone for coming out to show your carving skills!