Principal Investigators

Dr. Stan Boutin

University of Alberta

My research investigates how resource availability affects maternal investment, development of offspring, and lifetime reproductive success in boreal mammals. I wish to determine how individual behavioral and life history responses to current conditions are shaped by past conditions and future trade-offs. For over 25 years my students and I have used field studies of individual red squirrels and experimental manipulation of their environment to investigate these questions.

Dr. Ben Dantzer

University of Michigan

My research focuses on questions that integrate animal behavior, physiology, and evolutionary ecology. I am interested in understanding the factors shaping the evolution of behavioral and life history traits as well as how physiological traits both mediate but also constrain variation in life history and behavioral traits. In red squirrels, I study the mechanisms and evolutionary consequences of early life experiences among other questions. I use a combination of long-term data coupled with large-scale experimental manipulations and laboratory analyses to address my research questions.

Dr. Jeff Lane

University of Saskatchewan

I’m interested in the ways in which individuals and populations respond to short- and long-term variation in their natural environments. I combine theory and techniques from ecology, evolutionary biology, quantitative genetics and physiology to meet this challenge, and primarily work with wild mammal populations that have been studied for multiple decades. Red squirrels are an ideal study system in this sense, because we can track individuals across their entire lives, scale our individual data up to population-level metrics and quantify their primary food resource (white spruce seed).

Dr. Andrew McAdam

University of Colorado

I am interested in the interactions between ecology and contemporary adaptation. I use long-term pedigrees and experimental manipulations of resources and relatedness to quantify key ecological and quantitative genetic parameters. The goal of these investigations is to understand how an organism’s unique ecology contributes to contemporary patterns of selection and evolution.

Collaborators

Principal Investigators

Collaborators

Post Docs

Graduate Students

Dr. David Coltman

Western University

My lab developed microsatellites for red squirrels that we use for pedigree analyses. Paternity and kinship analyses make it possible to conduct quantitative genetic analyses, and to study the mating system and spatial genetic structure of the Kluane population. In the future we plan to use comparative genomics to identify the genes that determine adaptive variation in sciurids.

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Dr. Rudy Boonstra

University of Toronto

Being able to respond rapidly and effectively to challenges is key to fitness. The stress axis is central to making this happen. The stress response can vary among animals because of variation in maternal quality, of genetics, and of environment (poor vs good territories) and deteriorate as aging proceeds. Red squirrels are ideal, long-lived mammals to study these changes and to test hypotheses of aging, of life history constraints, etc. This research examines all aspects of the stress axis from the brain mechanisms, endocrinology, and energetics and links it into complementary studies going on simultaneously on behavior, genetics, and food manipulations.

Dr. DAvid Wilson

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Communication is essential for coordinating activities and maintaining relationships among kin, mates, neighbours, and any other individuals that interact. Indeed, communication is a necessary and driving force behind the evolution of animal sociality. Our research on red squirrels investigates the information content of acoustic signals, which are critical for defending territories necessary for survival. We have shown, for example, that squirrels communicate kin status, individual identity, and stress state through subtle variations in call structure. This research is important because it identifies mechanisms that can mediate critical social interactions, including territorial disputes among neighbours and nepotistic behaviours among kin.

Dr. Nancy Chen

University of Rochester

My lab studies the evolution of natural populations on short timescales by combining evolutionary genomics with long-term demographic studies. In collaboration with the Kluane Red Squirrel Project, we plan on linking variation in individual genetic contributions over time to allele frequency dynamics across the genome. This system provides a valuable opportunity to study the effects of highly fluctuating vs. more stable environments on short-term evolution in natural populations with known ecological contexts.

Post-Docs

Principal Investigators

Collaborators

Post Docs

Graduate Students

Dr. Matt Gaidica

University of Michigan

Hi—I’m Matt Gaidica, a neuroscientist working on tools to record brain rhythms from wild animals. I am interested in questions regarding extreme behaviors and environments, and the physiological mechanisms that animals use to enable or cope with those conditions. I recently finished my doctoral work at the University of Michigan where I was performing in-vivo electrophysiology on brain circuits involved in ballistic movements.

Dr. David Delaney

University of Colorado

I am interested in the theory and analysis of life-history traits and tradeoffs. I take an evolutionary ecologist's approach to study how life-history traits are shaped by environmental variation, both plastically and via natural selection.

Dr. Cameron P. Venable

University of Michigan

I have recently joined the Dantzer lab at the University of Michigan. At my core I am a Behavioral ecologist with an interest in the reciprocal interaction of physiology and behavior. I am keen to explore (1) how acute stressors (i.e weather anomalies) affect North American Red Squirrels within their lifetime, (2) quantifying maternal plasticity to adapt to the stressors, and (3) subsequently how this will affect their offspring.

Graduate Students

Principal Investigators

Collaborators

Post Docs

Graduate Students

Emily Studd

McGill University

I’m interested in how individuals respond behaviourally to environmental change and how these behavioral responses shape species interactions. My PhD explores these ideas in the context of a northern boreal food web where individuals experience drastic daily, seasonal, and annual changes in their local environment. By quantifying how three interacting mammals (red squirrel, snowshoe hare, and Canada lynx) adjust behaviourally to this dynamic northern environment, I hope to begin to untangle how behaviour impacts inter-species interaction strength and food web structure. A large part of my project involves the development of biologging approaches that record detailed behaviour over temporal scales relevant to food web ecology.

Sarah Westrick

University of Michigan

Working with Dr. Ben Dantzer, I am studying integrative aspects of maternal care and behavior for my PhD. I'm interested in the drivers and consequences of variation in maternal behavior, as well as the impact of maternal stress on offspring behavior and physiology. I am particularly enthused by integrative approaches and collaborations that combine many different techniques and perspectives to answer questions in a way that is ecologically relevant to the organism.

April Martinig

University of Alberta

PhD research on red squirrel personality and dispersal – investigating how fluctuating selection maintains consistent individual behavioural differences across life-history strategies in a population of red squirrels in the Yukon. You can find updates on my research on my website.

Dylan Baloun

University of Saskatchewan

I am a Ph.D. student exploring how we can integrate measures of metabolism with analyses of life-history traits to explore evolutionary questions and how environmental heat impacts small vertebrates in the northern boreal forest. I completed my H.B.Sc. (2015) at the University of Winnipeg where my thesis focused on the effects of feeding on plasma metabolites in endangered little brown bats. I completed my M.Sc. (2017) at the University of Western Ontario where my thesis tested predictions of the torpor-assisted migration hypothesis and asked questions about how life-history differences in migratory bats affect energy use during migratory stopover.

Alex Hare

University of Guelph

The use of social information allows animals to gain insights regarding the environment over much larger spatial scales, and in turn adjust their behaviour and physiology accordingly. Recent research has demonstrated both how social information can influence the physiology of developing individuals and how physiological stress through glucocorticoids produced via the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis can in turn alter signal production. My PhD research focuses on the interactions between these two factors, combining techniques from behavioural ecology and stress physiology in an integrative approach. I aim to investigate how social information influences the HPA axis and development through maternal and early-life stress effects, and in turn how these changes to the HPA axis influence signal production and reception in the North American red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus). This species defends discrete territories through highly stereotyped “rattle” vocalizations, rarely ever having direct physical confrontations with neighbouring individuals. This provides an excellent model to study how social information is influenced by and incorporated into the physiology of individuals under natural conditions.

Andrea Wishart

University of Saskatchewan

I am a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan. I'm interested in patterns of resource acquisition, management, and allocation in fluctuating environments. My thesis project seeks to answer the question "why do squirrels vary so much in how much food they cache?" and so I use a range of methods to quantify hypothesized environmental factors (e.g., local spruce cone production, local weather conditions) and individual factors (e.g., behaviour, body composition). I am also interested in population demographics (sex ratio theory) and facilitating long-term ecological research projects in general (I serve on the steering committee for the Section for Long-Term Research within the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution). Before joining KRSP, I received my HBSc in biology (2010) followed by my MSc studying copy number variation in the mouse genome (2014), both at the University of Western Ontario.

Allyson Menzies

McGill University

My PhD research focuses, broadly, on how co-existing species respond to shared variation in their environment. Specifically, I am using newly available and size-appropriate biologging technologies (e.g., accelerometers, heart rate and body temperature loggers, GPS collars) to characterize physiological and behavioural responses of winter-active endotherms (red squirrels, snowshoe hares, Canada lynx) to air temperature variation. My research will provide insight into metabolic, behavioural, and energetic demands of maintaining warm bodies in cold and seasonal environments.

Arianne Sawyer

University of Alberta

I am working under the supervision of Dr. Dave Coltman to study the rate of inbreeding and its effects in the Kluane red squirrel population. I am interested in looking at any effects on growth rate and/or survival, traits commonly affected by inbreeding depression. I will be using a pedigree comprised of over 10 years of genetic data, a valuable tool to study natural mating patterns.