Courtney publishes paper in Journal of Experimental Biology

The upshot: The gerbils that are the best jumpers are not necessarily the best maneuverers, and vice versa. Led by Courtney Reed, the Kartzinel Lab ran a series of controlled laboratory tests to discover that each individual's decision in the pivotal moment it meets a predator may be enabled by -- or constrained by -- the anatomy of its hind limbs. The paper Distinct morphological drivers of jumping and maneuvering performance in gerbils was published in Journal of Experimental Biology!

There is a lot to appreciate about what it took to make this discovery, behind the scenes:

• Treat yourselves to a look at some videos of gerbils jumping and running through the experimental apparatus that Courtney published in the supplementary materials.
• Read Courtney's Early Career Spotlight, published by the Journal of Experimental biology.
  
• Appreciate the cartoon published to promote the paper: Limb segments help jack-of-all-trades gerbils excel at manoeuvring!

This is a particularly gratifying culmination of significant work in the lab 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.