Month: May 2013

Animal Movement Ecology Summer School

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Our group is proud to announce the upcoming Animal Movement Ecology Summer School held at the University of Zurich (August 26–30 2013) and for which we already secured the contribution of leading scientist: Dr. Luca Börger, Dr. John Fieberg, Dr. Patrick Laube, Dr. Gabriela Schaepman-Strub, Dr. Dennis Hansen, Dr. Marc Kery, Prof. Arpat Ozgul.

This one-week course covers several aspects of animal movement ecology and includes both theoretical/conceptual and practical sessions.
The course builds on analytical complexity and leads the participant through several steps: from sourcing landscape information through available remote sensing imagery; to import and represent geographical data into R; to the calculation of home ranges; and finally to the characterisation and investigation of animal movement modes in a spatially explicit landscape matrix. The participants will furthermore be given an overview on patch occupancy models and how to treat and analyse presence/absence and abundance data. Fundamental aspects such as study design, spatial autocorrelation, sources of error and time varying covariates will be discussed.
Data sets will be provided but the participants are encouraged to bring their own data. Basic knowledge in R is required. Participants should bring their own laptop with the latest version of R installed. Active participation during the course is required to obtain the credit points.

Preliminary work at the Kalahari Meerkat Project

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After an exhausting and… interesting (I believe this is the politically correct term) road trip Arpat and I finally arrived at the Kalahari Meerkat Project research station along the dry riverbed of the Kuruman River, South Africa.

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The following day, despite the lack of rest (this is what happens if you end up digging your car out of the sand at 2 am on the previous night!) we were up and running and all excited about the idea of testing our three brand new GPS radio collars for meerkats. We soon realized that the collars were too big to fit around the neck of our tiny sand-digging friends. Surely enough there is nothing that a sharp swiss army knife can’t adjust (even MacGyver had one!) and so we opened the collars, reorganized the main components (GPS unit; ZigBee for bidirectional communication with the collar and data transfer; VHF transmitter; main battery) and sealed everything back together with a generous amount of duct tape.

The next day, with the precious help of Lewis Howell who captured and safely anesthetized the animals, the collars were proudly sitting around the neck of three merkaats, which, in turn, proudly showed off their new necklace. We unfortunately experienced some issues when we tried to remotely download the data but hey, it would be too easy if things would work out fine at the first attempt no? So we did some more tests and soon the two weeks of our preliminary work got to an end. We easily removed the collars from the animals, which did not show any sign of stress or damage caused by the 25 g collars, went for a last sun downer with people working at the project and got ready for the trip back to Johannesburg. There is a saying that says errare umanum est, perseverare diabolicum, surely enough even the road trip back to Johannesburg airport was…interesting. This time we did not have to dig ourselves out of the sand we simply managed to almost miss our flight!

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We are now back in Zurich and in the process of solving the software-related problems that we experienced in the field when we tried to download the data and are looking forward to start the main part of the project.

A gerbil riddle

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I received an interesting email from a geologist, also a close family friend. While researching for a road project at the Kazakhstan-China border, he became curious about the peculiar landscape patterns he came across on Google Earth. These are a battery of colluvial spots, each about 30m wide, distributed homogeneously across a gently sloping ground of loose material. He, an excellent field geologist, couldn’t ascribe these to any geomorphological origin, and became genuinely curious if this could be the habitat use pattern of a “groundhog-like” burrow dwelling creature.

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The density of the spots is truly peculiar and unlike those of the three marmot species I am familiar with. The area may host Altai/gray, Bobak, and Menzbier’s marmots, and about eight other ground squirrel species. After a quick search, I came across this website, where they describe the ‘historical’ densities of the Altai marmot as “in an area of about 25 thousand km2 lived approximately 3 million animals, 30-50 families of marmots per km-square… families graze close together, slowly moving around the site, no more than 30-40m from the hole.”

The above description kind of matched the observed pattern, but the density of the spots seemed too high and the radius too small. Maybe, it’s a smaller ground squirrel with higher population growth rates and smaller foraging habitat requirement? Infected by the curiosity of this geologist, I posted this on Facebook. Dr. Rich Grenyer, from Oxford School of Geography, responded indicating that Panoramio photo shots from Google Earth may give some clues, and to our pleasant surprise, among dozen photos of a barren steppe from that exact location, there was also this one:

 First, I thought it was a baby marmot, but the pointed nose and ears gave away the species after a bit of search: the Great Gerbil, Rhombomys opimus. Well then, can this be the culprit causing these patterns? Smaller than the marmots, burrow-dwelling, capable of reaching extreme densities, and wiki says “burrow system complexes have a distinctive region of cleared soil and can be easily seen in aerial photos“.

Someone even studied the plague dynamics in this species using aerial photos. Here’s a figure from their paper showing exactly the same formation:

Case closed! Curiosity won!

Mollie Brooks, our new quantitative ecologist

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We have a new quantitative ecologist joining our ranks, Mollie Brooks, who is a recent PhD graduate from University of Florida, Gainesville. Fresh out of Ben Bolker’s group, Mollie is bringing with her much needed skills in statistical and demographic analysis, and to our pleasant surprise, in baking!

During her postdoc, Mollie will contribute to our research projects on early warning signals and resurrecting past eco-evolutionary responses.