Dan's blog on marmots and music for the Huffington Post

Read Dan's blog for the Huffington Post about how the study of marmots informs our understanding of why and how music can be emotionally charged.

Pups are here!

Cody saw the first pup of the year today at Avalanche Cabin this morning.  Later Matt and Cody caught our first pup!

What's really interesting is that the mother that was seen moving pups last week is probably not the mother of these pups.  Matt told me today that Cherries (whom we captured last night) was not lactating.  This suggests that Cherries is helping her mother, aunt, or sister raise the pups.  Such alloparenting behavior happens, but it's rarely so obvious.  The downside of discovering that Cherries is not a mom this year is that this means there will be only one litter at Avalanche Cabin.  We're hoping on a good pup year to help recover the population. We'll see.

Mountain Lion in Gothic

My neighbor Alison Brody, a biology Professor from the University of Vermont and long-time RMBL researcher, took this photo the other day from her cabin window.  The lion was less than 75 m from our cabin!

We've always known that mountain lions were potential marmot predators and in some years we find a deer-killed mountain lion, or a fresh track around Gothic.  But we've never seen them.  This is the best sighting of a lion in Gothic in recent history!

pups are coming soon!

This is an exceptionally early year!  A RMBL neighbor just sent me this photo of a marmot mom moving her rather large pups between burrows.  Hopefully, the population will recover a bit more this year (she saw 5-7 pups being moved!).

Stay tuned!

Marmots make Clobert Report!

Marmots make Clobert Report.  It's around 0:50...sadly a predator drone eliminated this important militant leader following his emergence!

MHC art!

Elizabeth Overholser owns property that we study marmots on at the RMBL.  She's also a keen quilter and  wanted to combine her love for quilting and her fondness for marmots.  Amanda's been sequencing some marmot MHC genes and Elizabeth asked for some genetic sequences which she expanded into this lovely quilt!  Our immediate response: how cool!  


Hope you'll enjoy this as much as we do...  

Thanks Elizabeth!

UCLA Science Poster Day 2012!

Today was poster day, and boy did these posters look great! 

The undergraduates in our lab explained their exciting 

new discoveries to the broader UCLA community.

Rachel Stafford-Lewis: 

Proximate mechanisms mediating life history trade-offs in 

facultatively social yellow-bellied marmots

Kathy Nguyen: 

Yellow-bellied marmot call structure is heritable

Lawrance Chung: 

Ontogeny of social partner choice in free-living yellow-bellied marmots

  

Connie Lin: 

Does serotonin modulate social interactions in hermit crabs?

And, last but not least, the "killer" title,

"The Omnivore's dilemma: diet explains variation in roadkill mortality"

By Taylor Cook

There were also members from Barney Schlinger's lab presenting on their research on hormones and genetics in song birds. 

Lots of good questions were asked and new insights were gained...

 

 

Lawrance's poster provoked a lot of positive (affiliative) 

social interactions within his social group...

 But, alas, all good things must come to an end and the poster's came down. Luckily, the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology will have its own showing of these posters tomorrow, so be sure to stop by the Fifteenth Annual Biology Research Symposium - Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at 1:00 - 4:00PM at the UCLA Faculty Center...See you there!