CSULB Stankowich Lab: Behavioral Evolution

07/17/2024

SoCal folks! We are holding our huge annual FREE open house event "Sharks at the Beach, Science in the Hall" this Saturday (7/20) 10am-3pm at CSU Long Beach! Bring the family to tour the shark and marine labs, our mammal and bird skeleton and pelt collections (you can touch the specimens!), fossil digging, our co**se flower, and physics, geology, chemistry, and math activities and demos. I and my team will be showing the collections, so please come and visit and definitely say hello if you come. There will be food trucks and areas with free parking. Get out of the heat in our cool buildings and nerd out on the science! Check out the event page for details: https://www.csulb.edu/college-of-natural-sciences-and-mathematics/event/sharks-at-the-beach-and-science-the-hall-2024

06/01/2024

End of the year lab party at the LA Zoo on Thursday! Thanks to Director Beth Schaefer for the personal tour and arranging meetings with keepers!
.csulb

05/30/2024

Excited to get my official award letter that I've been promoted to Full Professor of Biological Sciences at CSULB! I think this makes me a Jedi Master, right? Drinking a very $pecial bourbon to celebrate!

05/15/2024

Our new study of mammalian predator learning about warning coloration in prey with Caitlin Fay and Dr. Julie Young from Utah State Univ where we trained coyotes to not attack spraying skunk models has been written up in National Geographic! If you hit a paywall and want to read it, let me know and I can send a pdf of the article.

New research is upending a long-held assumption that skunks’ black-and-white colors are what warn coyotes and other animals not to mess with them.

04/18/2024

Excited about our new study of coyotes learning about aposematic defenses of skunks in the journal Animal Behaviour, the first study on aposematic learning in mammals! In collaboration with former MS student Caitlin Fay and Dr. Julie Young at Utah State University, we trained captive coyotes to avoid striped skunk models that sprayed real skunk oil when attacked. Most studies of aposematic learning focus on bird predators and insect or frog prey.

We first conditioned captive skunk-naïve coyotes to eat off brown furry models, then gave them skunk models that would spray if attacked. Some were sprayed once and never attacked again. Others were sprayed up to 9 times & never stopped. But they showed greater wariness of black and white models than brown models and most quickly learned to not attack the skunks. Males were bolder and more willing to attack than females, and younger subjects learned faster. We then gave those that learned to avoid the training model other furry models that varied in how black or white they were. Coyotes were more likely to attack blacker models than whiter models, suggesting generalization of aposematic avoidance is stronger when the signal is whiter.

This is the first experimental study of aposematic learning in a mammalian predator-prey system and suggests coyotes have a predisposed wariness of black-and-white coloration, can quickly learn to avoid skunks, and can generalize to variant patterns to some extent.

You can check out the paper here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1iy6XmjM6FdS

04/15/2024

So excited for our new collaborative paper in Proccedings of the National Academy of Sciences with the Urban Wildlife Information Network on the effects of gentrification on wildlife! Gentrification occurs when less wealthy residents from under-served groups are displaced by educated, White, higher income residents in certain neighborhoods. We used camera trap data from 1000 sites in 23 cities over 3 years along with a measure of gentrification from US Census data to show that gentrified areas of eastern cities had 1-2 more species on average than non-gentrified areas (increased alpha diversity or species richness) and western cities had greater changes in community composition in gentrified areas (different species, beta diversity). So, the effects of gentrification extend to non-human animals and set up potential social inequities of reduced access to native urban wildlife. We must work to establish equitable urban environmental policies to avoid such dispossession in minoritized and marginalized communities! Thanks to Mason Fidino for leading this charge!

04/11/2024

Big thank you to the local Long Beach family and CSULB alumni that donated their amazing family collection of and skulls to the Vertebrate Collections! We're so excited to receive these beautiful items so that they can serve an educational use in their next life. All items were legally hunted more than 30 years ago, mostly in Alaska. We've in turn donated many of these items to collections at CSU Fullerton, CSU San Bernardino, and CSU Northridge since we don't have room for all of it. As educational institutions, we are legally able to accept items that are no longer able to be sold in CA. We look forward to using these items in our classes and educational outreach programs in the future!

03/09/2024

Congratulations to Erin Weiner .w81 for successfully defending her MS thesis on wildlife responses to wildfire! Incredible job on both your thesis and your seminar! Thanks to the lab members that came to support you and celebrate! 🎉🎉
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11/10/2023

Congratulations to former lab MS student Hannah Hobson for publishing her thesis research on squirrel and rabbit responses to human approachers! The study examined how they assessed risk dynamically, using approach trajectory and walking path use to determine the level of threat and when to flee. Great job!

10/29/2023

The Mammal Lab had a great time at our annual Halloween Pumpkin Carving Party on Friday afternoon! Thanks to everyone for coming out to show your carving skills!

10/07/2023

We had a big new paper published today in Evolution on why skunk stripes are variable in some places but uniform in others. We used 749 museum skins to examine several hypotheses for why an aposematic (warning) signal like skunk stripes should be variable when having consistent stripes in a population should help predators make fewer mistakes about attacking.

We measured total whiteness, amount of contrast border, and symmetry of stripes on skunks from all over North America and looked at how these metrics varied in relation to predation risk from mammals and birds, temp, snow, shadiness, and humidity.

Skunks from areas with greater predation risk had more contrasting patterns (longer stripes) and less variable stripes, with mammal predators having a stronger effect than birds. Predators favor stronger signals and more uniform signals. Relaxed selection leads to greater variation!

Congrats to former MS student Hannah Walker on publishing her thesis research! National Geographic published a great article on our paper today, too!

07/13/2023

Today was the opening day of the 60th Meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Portland. I'm the Program Officer and have spent the last 12 months planning this meeting for 600 people, so this has been a stressful few days. I welcomed everyone this morning and had the privilege of introducing the Keynote speaker, Dr. Dan Blumstein from UCLA. Other than a couple of minor issues to deal with, today went fairly smoothly. Let's hope the rest of the week goes well! Now for some sleep!