Try to guess what this odonate ate in this week’s Creature Feature!
Sunday Sketch: Snow Leopard
Check out this fun fact about snow leopards!
Field Frame Friday: Sea Turtle Meets Sea Cube
A curious turtle inspects a calibration cube used to reconstruct the 3D view that two GoPros capture in stereo. The videos are used to record fish swimming behaviors in the field. This work was done in Bonaire in April 2023 by Darien Satterfield. [Photo and caption by Darien Satterfield] [Edited by Ian Ramshorn Haliburton]
Sunday Sketch: Squirrels & snakes
Check out this fun fact about squirrels!
Creature Feature: California Quail
In California, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area encompasses 80,000 acres of land smattered along the north and south entrances of the San Francisco Bay and connected by the Golden Gate Bridge. To the south of the iconic bridge are 30,000 acres of steep, rolling hills of buildings, busy streets, snuggled Victorian era houses, and,…
Sunday Sketch: Doe-eyed deer
Check out this fun fact about the white-tailed deer!
Field Frame Friday: Hot, Sweaty, Fieldwork Ready
Taking breaks and having fun is important in all professions, but especially in field work! Kirsten and Jon found that putting frozen Gatorade bottles on their foreheads and dubbing themselves ‘gatorade unicorns’ was the perfect way to take a break from looking for little fish in an urban waterway (above) and have a laugh in…
Field Notes: Amped Amphibians
Growing up, I had a friend who was extremely outgoing, had boundless energy, and liked to take more risks than most other people I knew. I remember asking myself, “Where does all that energy come from? What gives this person such a confident personality?” Bold, confident personalities in people can make them seem like ‘go-getters,’…
Sunday Sketch: Rainbow Trout
Check out this fun fact about rainbow trout!
Newsroom: Let’s synchronize our watches: Insights from Halictid bees and how our social environment affects our biological rhythms.
Check out this Newsroom piece about circadian rhythms & bees!
Sunday Sketch: Reindeer games
Check out this fun fact about reindeer!
Creature Feature: Black Phoebe
There’s more to this black-and-white backyard bird than meets the eye!
Sunday Sketch: Alligator Lizard
Check out this fun fact about alligator lizards!
Sunday Sketch: The blue-spotted ribbontail ray
Check out this fun fact about the blue-spotted ribbontail ray!
Field Frame Friday: Spotty Dads are not Shoddy Dads
A Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularius) father keeps a vigilant eye on his nearby nest from a creek-side perch. In Spotted Sandpipers, males take on most of the parenting duties, including incubating the eggs and protecting the newly hatched chicks, while females provide less parental care. One goal of my research is to determine how parental…
Field Notes: The Winding Path to a PhD with Zoo Animals
I’m a first year PhD student in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group, but I’ve had many different titles over the last ten years: zookeeper, animal trainer, and most recently, veterinarian. When people discover I am a licensed veterinarian, most are justifiably confused. “Why are you still going to school? Haven’t you had enough?” they ask….
Sunday Sketch: The Long-tailed tit
Check out this fun fact about the long-tailed tit!
Newsroom: “Beary” Complex Enrichment for Captive Malayan Sun Bears Newsroom:
Check out this new study about enrichment for captive sun bears, done by Yasmeen Ghavamian, of the Animal Biology Graduate Group!
Sunday Sketch: Penguin Pals
Check out this fun fact about penguins!
Field Frame Friday: Gobble Grabbin’
Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) can be common backyard birds in some cities—like here in Davis, CA! Texas A&M PhD Student Amanda Beckman visited Davis as part of a study spanning the country to learn more about the genetic and behavioral impacts that urban living might have on Wild Turkeys, receiving some help in the field…
Sunday Sketch: Bengal Tigers
Check out this fun fact about tigers!
Sunday Sketch: Humpback Whales
Check out this fun fact about Humpback whales!
Field Frame Friday: A Little Moo for You!
Jersey dairy calves (like the cutie seen here) are smaller than their Holstein counterparts, which are the black and white spotted dairy cows. Jerseys typically weigh around 60 pounds (27kg), compared to Holstein calves who can be born at over 100 lbs (45kg)! These are the two most common breeds of dairy cows in the…
Field Notes: Calves, collars and cuteness
You’d think that looking at baby animals all day would be the perfect job, but it certainly comes with some unique challenges… ______________________________________________________________________ I study abnormal behaviors in dairy cattle (for more info on what it’s like to do research at the Dairy, check out my previous field notes piece here), which are performed across…
Sunday Sketch: Two-headed Holstein
Check out this fun fact about naturally occurring two-headed animals!
Creature Feature: Three-toed Sloths
Here is a species that lives up to its namesake. Sloths are known for being extraordinarily slow, with a maximum speed of around 250 meters per hour moving amongst the trees [1]. For comparison, humans tend to walk around 5000 meters per hour. Have you ever wondered why these animals are so, well, slothful? Let’s…
Science Heroes: Hedy Lamarr
It’s the mid-1910s and the bustling city of Vienna, Austria is alive with gossip about the end of World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Austrian-Hungarian empire. Zippers have recently been invented, freeing women to move about much more comfortably than while wearing their restricting, recently abandoned, corset-bound attire. In a Jewish neighborhood…
Sunday Sketch: Soaring Seagulls
Check out this fun fact about seagulls!
Field Frame Friday: Simply Ravenous
Common Ravens (Corvus corax) are famously smart, adaptable and opportunistic, and while these traits serve them well, they can often get them into trouble, too. What kind of trouble do you think the raven on the left got itself into to earn a bright blue tag and the attention of scientists? The tagged raven and…
Sunday Sketch: Tuna Crab
Check out this fun fact about tuna crabs!
Creature Feature: Seahorse
As orange sunlight begins to creep over the shallow seabed and scatter across the tropical water, seahorses emerge from their hiding spots within the gently-swaying marine vegetation. Before long, they wriggle toward one another, pairing up at predetermined rendezvous points and begin swimming up and down, tails oscillating side to side. The ritual dances have…
Sunday Sketch: Giddy Goats
In recent years, a popular way to help control overgrown vegetation is to hire world’s cutest gardener—the goat! Goats will eat woody vegetation and dry grasses, making them efficient at clearing a field. Studies have shown they have a positive influence on vegetation composition. Art by @heathertaylorsart, fact by Cassidy Cooper [Edited by Isabelle McDonald]…
Field Frame Friday: Who’s this chick??
A Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularius) chick shows off its shiny new leg band, which contains a unique ID number used by researchers to identify this individual. This chick will continue growing throughout the summer, migrate south for the winter, and perhaps return to its birthplace in the Mono Basin to breed next summer. [Photo and…
Field Notes: Chatting with Cetaceans
Throughout my scientific career, I have mainly studied our closest non-human primate relatives and their quirky behaviors (see my previous field notes here). However, when my graduate school advisor asked if I’d be interested in helping with a research project on humpback whales, I was excited at the prospect of starting something entirely new and…
Sunday Sketch: Fancy Foxes
Check out this fun Valentine’s fact about foxes!
Sunday Sketch: Portugese man of war
Check out this fun fact about the Portugese man of war!
Field Frame Friday: Turtle party!
Meet Testudo hermanni hermanni, a Mediterranean tortoise present in Italy, France and Spain. Its captive breeding was made necessary by the destruction of its native habitat. The challenge for current breeders, unlike most of the species bred as pets, is to maintain as much as possible the purity of the species, subspecies and, if possible,…
Sunday Sketch: Bashful Bunnies
Check out this fun fact about bunnies!
Creature Feature: Domestic Chicken
Learn more about the latest and greatest fowl to cross our desk!
Field Notes: The First of Many Lasts
As I pack up my car on a breezy August day, I take one last breath of the cool, ocean air filled with scents of sagebrush and eucalyptus, realizing that while this wouldn’t be my last trip to the Marin Headlands, this is the last time I will be collecting data for graduate school. —…
Sunday Sketch: The Great Gorilla
Check out this fun fact about gorillas!
Field Frame Friday: This is how I show my love – QUAIL
A California Quail (Callipepla californica) poses majestically on a shrub. California Quail participate in brood-mixing, where multiple female quail will raise multiple offspring (related and not-related) in communal family groups. It is suggested that females involved in communal family groups also live longer than those in single family groups. There are benefits of being a…
Sunday Sketch: Anatomy of a Narwhal
Check out this fun fact about narwhals!
Field Frame Friday: Flexy Fanaloka
Check out this trail cam photo of a spotted fanaloka (Fossa fossana) taken in Madagascar during Meredith Lutz’s field season. Spotted fanaloka adjust their activity patterns to avoid humans and invasive carnivores, like dogs, during seasons of increased human and dog activity. [Photo and Caption by Meredith Lutz] Reference: Farris, Z. J., Gerber, B. D.,…
Creature Feature: American black bear
We’re about to finish checking our bird traps at Tioga Pass when I spot it– a moving black lump in the upper right hand corner of my eye. We freeze. “Holy–” I say. “Is that…?” I slowly raise my binoculars. It is. Standing on a boulder, huffing its huge steaming snout in the morning air,…
Sunday Sketch: The Southern carmine bee-eater
Check out this fun fact about The Southern Carmine Bee-eater!
Field Notes: Four Field Perspectives
Field biology is almost always a team endeavor. Field crews often include people with different levels of experience and biological backgrounds—and each member brings something valuable to the team, from budding young scientists to experienced researchers. Going into the Summer of 2022, my second field season researching Spotted Sandpipers (Actitis macularius), I was nervous ….
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