Montana Stone's award-winning photo featured by Brown's Medical School

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
​-Montana Stone