The magazine Medicine@Brown featured Montana Stone's award-winning photo of "Zorro" -- a culpeo fox -- taken at our long-term ecological research site in Fray Jorge National Park in Chile. It's a fantastic shot of an amazing, and poorly known predator. As the BioMed communications team said, this image from Montana's field work is a poignant way to remind people that our mission in the Division is to advance the "health of people AND planet." We always love to remind people that our health is intimately, and inextricably, linked to what's happening in nature and around the planet. In spring 2024, I spent a month collecting data for my doctoral research as part of the longest-running ecological experiment of its type in Fray Jorge National Park, Chile. One evening, after a long day of fieldwork under the intense Chilean sun, an Andean zorro (Lycalopex culpaeus) emerged near our field station. The fox, both curious and cautious, watched us intently as we wrapped up for the day. Sensing the rare opportunity, I quickly captured a photo before it vanished into the brush. Experiences like this fuel my determination to understand the cascading impacts on ecosystems if remarkable creatures like the Andean zorro were to face extinction
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With some much-anticipated fanfare in a press release from Uppsala University, Elin led a paper on describing the diets and microbiomes of three giraffe species that all live in close proximity to each other around the equator in Kenya. This work was initiated together with Brian Gill and Peter Lokeny many years ago.
This paper involved close collaboration with colleagues at the Mpala Research Centre, The National Museums of Kenya, and Giraffe Conservation Foundation. It represents a meaningful step toward better understanding the ecology of these amazing, but poorly understood endangered species -- and it directly informs on-the-ground conservation efforts aimed at ensuring long-term access to nutritious resources to fuel the recovery of populations. The original article was published open access in Global Ecology and Conservation and the press release is entitled "Unexpected discoveries in study of giraffe gut flora." |
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