Behavioral Ecology Blog

As of yesterday, field-blogging has begun. For those of you interested… some details. My field site is just outside Palm Desert, Riverside County, California. Specifically, I work at The Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center. It is a fantastic place- 14k acres of pristine desert land. The station is modern- almost hotel like. There is a fully equipped kitchen, living room, bathroom with shower. The bedrooms are basic- bed, chair, desk, closet. There is some lab space, but really no equiptment. You should check out some of my field photos at CalPhotos- HERE. (some are not fron Deep Canyon)

The weather is wonderful this time of year. Daytime highs in the mid 80’s, sunshine. Lows are in the 60’s. This is in stark contrast to what it will be in 6 weeks- 110’s basically every day.

So what do I do here.. In a nutshell, I am working with the small mammals/rodents. There are 2 species of Peromyscus, 5 species of Chaetodipus, a Neotoma sp., and K. rats. I am live trapping- targetting the Peromyscus, but catching alot of the Chaetodipus. The K. rats are pretty scarce in the more rocky parts of there reserve where I am.

My goals for the summer are pretty simple.

1. Collection of pregnant females for analysis of the genetic mating system.
2. Behavioral Data to hopefull corroborate whatever the genetic ananlysis shows
3. Collection is vaginal swabs to look at vaginal mmicroflora, i.e. bacterial.
4. Collection of tissues to do the MHC analyses.
5. Have fun

Trapping the 1st night here, (4/13/07) was not so hot. On ~80 traps, I only got 4 animals. 3 C. formosus, and 1 P. eremicus. A good night of trapping is >10% catch on the traps, or 8+ animals. I trapped the same area last year with really good success, so its unclear where the animals are… A couple of possibilities include.

1. 1st night. I’ve found that the 1st night trapping in a given area is usually the worst. I think that animals are scared of the traps at 1st, avoid them…
2. High over winter mortality. This is a distinct possibility. Southern California is in a drought. In Deep Canyon, the last major rain fall was in August 2006- which is very uncommon. Although the animals do not need extrinsic water- they are dependant on plants that do.

I’ll tell you now that I don’t have high hopes for tomorrow either.. It is REALLY windy here. 30mph winds with gusts to 50mph. 1st, wind blows the traps shot- as much as 15% of traps will probably be closed in this fashion. Also, it seems likely that the animals just don’t like to be out when it is so windy… We’ll see- I keep you posted on this one.