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."

Courtney publishes the first product of her dissertation in Journal of Experimental Biology! Should a gerbil jump or run zig-zags when it's confronted by a predator? The upshot: Courtney ran a series of controlled laboratory tests to discover that each individual's decision in that pivotal moment may be enabled by -- or constrained by -- the anatomy of its hind limbs. The best jumpers are not necessarily the best maneuverers, and vice versa. 

Treat yourselves to a look at some videos of gerbils jumping and running through the experimental apparatus that Courtney published in the supplementary materials.

This is a particularly gratifying culmination of significant work in no small part because it originated as a 'pandemic project' when our plans for field research got stymied. The work featured an all-star crew of departmental colleagues, postdocs, and undergraduate researchers to boot. 

The accepted article is online ahead of print at Journal of Experimental Biology and should be published to open-access (freely available) repositories shortly: Distinct morphological drivers of jumping and maneuvering performance in gerbils

A new paper from the lab was led by postdoc Bethan Littleford-Colquhoun and published in Royal Society Open Science: "Body size modulates the extent of seasonal diet switching by large mammalian herbivores in Yellowstone National Park." The paper is free to read and download.

Beth used cutting-edge genetic and GPS-tracking technologies to test age-old ideas about why animals select the foods that they do. The work involved collaboration from experts in wildlife ecology and management, genomics, remote sensing, and botany -- with contributions from the National Park Service, several citizen science organizations, and funding from NSF as well as the Department of Interior. 

As Beth summarized in an interview with News@Brown, we have come to more accurately understand wildlife populations as a collection of animals that can respond individualistically to changes in their environment. From summer to winter, animals have to radically change the kinds of foods they eat. But it's not just that: they also have to take care to update their overall foraging strategy as they shift from foraging socially as part of a large herd to foraging more independently for their own unique sets of resources. 

The news summary by Corrie Pikul is available here: How do coexisting animals find enough to eat? Biologists unlock insights into foraging habits in Yellowstone

Congratulations to Bianca Brown, microbiome scientist extraordinaire, on her publication appearing today in Ecosphere! Spatiotemporal variation in the gut microbiomes of co-occurring wild rodent species is freely available via open access. It is a rare example of the type of insightful work that can develop through collaborations involving field, lab, and big-data analytical approaches to really understand what's going on with wildlife. It is part of our long-term collaboration with the UHURU project at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya.

The paper led by Brian Gill on individual-level tracking of elephant diets -- Foraging History of Individual Elephants Using DNA Metabarcoding -- was just published by Royal Society Open Science. We are very proud of this paper, which revisits a set of classic studies on seasonal diet switching by elephants using stable isotopes in hair that were led by coauthors Thure Cerling and George Wittemeyer. The work was made possible with support in the field from Save the Elephants and with the botanical expertise of coauthor Paul Musili from the National Museums of Kenya.

The paper was accompanied by a great summary by Corrie Pikul and featured on the Brown University homepage: Similar to Humans, Elephants Vary What they Eat for Dinner. 

The paper also attracted attention in the media, including interviews on BBC Television and Times Radio. Some nice coverage of the study was also provided by BBC (with hilarious photos), Newsweek, ZME Science, and The Times. 

Congratulations to Beth for having her CRISPR-based barcoding paper published at Molecular Ecology Resources! The paper is available ahead of print on the publisher's website and we will post a PDF to our lab's publications page. Our original summary based on her preprint in June is still available in the text that follows.

Beth just posted a much-anticipated BioRxiv preprint describing our new efforts to repurpose CRISPR technology in ways that might help overcome persistent drawbacks to PCR and other targeted enrichment strategies in molecular ecology (doi: 10.1101/2023.06.30.547247v1). We show that we can obtain highly accurate plant DNA barcodes and assemble entire chloroplast genomes. These advances could help with species identification, discovery, and the construction of DNA reference libraries for use in a variety of applications. Moreover, we show incredible accuracy when it comes to estimating the relative abundance of DNA from a mixture of species compared to typical PCR-based methods for DNA metabarcoding.

We hope the experimental methods will be of interest and that folks working in the field will see the great potential. Once scalable, these advantages could really transform the quality and completeness of many projects that we do in the lab -- and the kinds of project we know a lot of folks are out there trying to do around the world as well!

The approach was noted to be a potentially 'high risk / high reward' of the NSF CAREER award that supported our work. We'll update once it is peer-reviewed and published.

An exciting paper from the lab on lizard behavior, let by (former) undergraduate all-star Thomas Patti, appears today in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. The "Bite and Seek" paper focuses on the exploratory behaviors and bite force of the Podarcis lizard colony that we had on campus. Thomas and the team tested an extensive series of hypotheses about the relationship between behaviors observed in populations of this non-native lizard species and the recency of population establishment. All else equal, propensity for exploration might be expected to facilitate the establishment of new populations -- lizards have to explore at least a little to get somewhere new -- and thus recently founded populations should comprise groups of explorers. Not so in nature, Thomas reports, and this requires us to take a more nuanced view of behavioral 'syndromes' as sets of traits and behaviors that may be associated with invasion potential and success in non-native species. Great work Thomas, Colin, Andy, and Caroline!

Congratulations to Robert Ang'ila for publishing a paper based on his Masters research in African Journal of Ecology! Robert's paper reports on spatial associations between the abundance and diversity of wildlife and understory plant communities across the massive CTFS-ForestGEO plot at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. The work highlights how fine-scale variation in soil and topography can shape plant-herbivore interaction networks that play out over much broader scales. Great work, Robert!

A million congrats to Bianca Brown on her latest publication, which now appears typeset and formatted in Molecular Ecology! Bianca's insight, creativity, and leadership are on full display in this masterpiece of a paper that investigates patterns of phylosymbiosis in the small mammal community at Mpala Research Centre. Bianca highlights the importance of phylogenetic scale in investigations of phylosymbiosis and underscores the value of studies that investigate how local ecological context can modify our 'global' expectations about host-microbiome associations. Way to go, Bianca!

Brown BRP, Goheen JR, Newsome SD, Pringle RM, Palmer TM, Khasoha LM, Kartzinel TR. 2023. Host phylogeny and functional traits differentiate gut microbiomes in a diverse natural community of small mammals. Molecular Ecology doi: 10.1111/mec.16874

There is a fascinating population of Italian Wall Lizards living in Boston's Fenway Gardens. Even during the height of the pandemic, members of the Lizard Team were able to do some fieldwork observing and tracking the lizard population at this novel site for the species. In the first of several publications the team is leading from this time, we recently published a Natural History Note in Herpetological Review describing a couple of instances of avian predation observed: a hawk and a grackle separately preyed on individuals from this population. The population has only been around for a short number of years, and there are no native lizards in this region, so this represented novel predatory behaviors on a no-analog lizard population in the region. Scroll to page 500 of this [PDF] for some interesting observation and incredible photos published -- congrats team!