Sunday, April 28, 2013
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Friday, April 26, 2013
DIGS Goes Green
Being a Michigan State University Spartan myself, I'm not sure I've ever been able to get our hyenas out here to shout "go green" to us (in response to us shouting "go white," of course). However this morning an adult female in our North clan DIGS got just about as close as she could to going green. Check it out!
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Microryza and an Opportunity to Help
Dear Hyena Fans,
The hyena project is getting involved in crowd sourcing ourfunding once more, and we’d like to ask for your help! We’ve created a research page with the help of Microryza. By visiting our research page, you not only get to see some hyena clips, you can also help us out!
Money has been tight the last few months, and I’m hoping to get some funds to support my PhD research, and the current research taking place in our lab. I’ve blogged about my research before (e.g. A Sentinel for African Ecosystems and Text Messaging with Hyenas), so feel free to check out those posts for more information.
To help out, please consider donating to our project page at Microryza. If we can’t get up to our goal ($2,500US) in the time frame (2 months remaining), unfortunately we don’t get any of the funds pledged in support. This small amount of money will go a long way in our research, so please consider helping us out!
Thanks a lot! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post comments to the blog or email me at greend31@msu.edu.
Hope you’re having a great start to the New Year.
Dave
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Short Rains and Collaring
Although the short rains came a bit late this year, they have still made it hard for us to get out of camp and do hyena research. That being said, we made it out 2 mornings ago and were on a quest to find the last hyena in the Mara Triangle destined to receive a GPS collar. Her name is JAVA, and she may be the new queen in one if our clans in the Mara Triangle.
Not sure how it worked out...but we found her and the collar deployment was a success! We weren't expecting to find her because she hasn't been spending too much time away from the den (she has a cub that's 3 months old).
We're very excited to monitor her movement and space use with this super cool technology.
We'll keep you posted!
Not sure how it worked out...but we found her and the collar deployment was a success! We weren't expecting to find her because she hasn't been spending too much time away from the den (she has a cub that's 3 months old).
We're very excited to monitor her movement and space use with this super cool technology.
We'll keep you posted!
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Newborn Zebra
Check out this footage I got of a newborn zebra here in the Mara. It was fun watching it take its first steps (and subsequent spills)!
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Rained In, Game On
Hello people! The start of the short rains out here in the Mara have given me the time to finally contribute some material to this blog. In all honesty, I've certainly had the time to do this sooner, so lets just say that the short rains have brought on a new level of boredom that has allowed me to expand upon -what some may call- my routine out here.
The month of October consisted of a healthy amount of rain. There were quite a few times where we couldn't go out due to the rain, but nothing like this. I think in the last 3 days, we've gone out for a total of 45 minutes. I never thought I would get bored of sleeping in, but it has happened. So what have we been doing to pass the time? Lots of reading, and I know Dave and Julia have been doing work on their own research, but I think that I speak on behalf of the group here when I say that the climax of the days events is when we put aside all personal endeavors and break out the game of games - Settlers of Catan. Its a board game consisting of building roads and cities, trading resources, and teaming up against the person who is winning (aka Dave). They told me it was addicting when they taught me how to play... and they were right. Even now, as I'm sitting here writing this blog, I'm praying that Dave and Julia put aside their real people work for an hour and so that I can get my fix.
Its all made worse by the fact that I haven't even won a game yet. Hopefully that changes soon, or the month of November is going to be overcast in more than one way.
The month of October consisted of a healthy amount of rain. There were quite a few times where we couldn't go out due to the rain, but nothing like this. I think in the last 3 days, we've gone out for a total of 45 minutes. I never thought I would get bored of sleeping in, but it has happened. So what have we been doing to pass the time? Lots of reading, and I know Dave and Julia have been doing work on their own research, but I think that I speak on behalf of the group here when I say that the climax of the days events is when we put aside all personal endeavors and break out the game of games - Settlers of Catan. Its a board game consisting of building roads and cities, trading resources, and teaming up against the person who is winning (aka Dave). They told me it was addicting when they taught me how to play... and they were right. Even now, as I'm sitting here writing this blog, I'm praying that Dave and Julia put aside their real people work for an hour and so that I can get my fix.
Its all made worse by the fact that I haven't even won a game yet. Hopefully that changes soon, or the month of November is going to be overcast in more than one way.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Elephant Roadblock
Dear Elephants,
Look, I get it. You're huge. So huge in fact, that you can stop traffic and prevent cars like my own from going a certain way.
That's OK, I'm familiar with your ways. In fact when training new researchers on driving through roundabouts in Nairobi, I always say, "cars in the roundabout always have the right of way, unless they're bigger than you." Same rules must apply in the Mara too, I guess.
Point taken.
Elephants: 1
David: 0
At any rate, I'm glad to see you're back in the Mara after your exodus to avoid the migration.
Xoxo,
David
Look, I get it. You're huge. So huge in fact, that you can stop traffic and prevent cars like my own from going a certain way.
That's OK, I'm familiar with your ways. In fact when training new researchers on driving through roundabouts in Nairobi, I always say, "cars in the roundabout always have the right of way, unless they're bigger than you." Same rules must apply in the Mara too, I guess.
Point taken.
Elephants: 1
David: 0
At any rate, I'm glad to see you're back in the Mara after your exodus to avoid the migration.
Xoxo,
David
Thursday, August 2, 2012
An ode to Target and Welcoming Junior
In memory of Target, Dee sent me a picture of Target dressed in MSU hyena research swag, and Kay’s jacket. Thank you, Target, for braving all the crazy hyenas who try to attack your face.
But now we have Junior, who is in much better shape.
Unfortunately, recently the hyenas have been pretty quiet, so I haven’t had many opportunities to throw Junior out into the wild. This is the nature of field work; the animals don’t always do what you want them to.
Since Junior has arrived, he has seen some action, but luckily nothing like what Target saw. This morning, I had a near heart attack though, when Artemis bolted at Junior. Flashing through my head was, “Oh my gosh, how do I rescue Junior?!? Artemis is running so fast! AAAAH!” Luckily for Junior and me, she stopped abruptly about 10m away from Junior.
Since I am about to leave for the summer, this is probably one of Junior’s last outings until I am back next year or someone else has a good idea for Junior to do.
Friday, July 20, 2012
What do we do with all this poop?
Whenever we see one of our hyenas doin’ its business, we try to collect a fecal sample. This may strike you as pretty disgusting (and indeed, it sometimes is), but poop can provide us with a wealth of information about the inner workings of hyenas. We can use a small sample to measure a variety of hormone levels and even extract DNA to determine their genetic relatedness to other individuals. Because physiological changes can be a warning sign of impending population declines, as David Green described in a recent post, we are also planning to explore what stress hormone levels in hyena poop can signal about the status of mammals in the Mara ecosystem (for more on this, and for opportunities to help through our sponsorship by Petridish, check out http://www.petridish.org/projects/a-sentinel-for-african-ecosystems). All of this makes us hyena researchers quite excited when we see a study subject dropping us one of these treasured morsels, can locate it in the grass, get it into a ziplock bag in the field, and then stuff it into vials that are frozen in liquid nitrogen back at camp.
But the road from watching a hyena poop to having usable data is a long one. This spring, before heading out to the Mara for my two-year field season, fellow grad student Sarah Jones and I packed up about 550 hyena fecal samples and headed to the University of Nebraska to see what our hyenas’ various bowel movements over the past six years or so could tell us. Sarah was analyzing samples for androgen levels (a class of hormones including testosterone). I analyzed samples for corticosterone – a main mammalian stress hormone.
After our precious cargo made it safely to Omaha (driving around with a back seat full of coolers of valuable poop is a bit unnerving), we learned from endocrine god Dr. Jeff French how to transform our stinky poop samples into PhD gold. Dr. French normally spends his time exploring the connections between hormones and behavior in marmoset monkeys and humans but takes a break every few years to help us process these more exotic poops transported all the way from the wilds of Africa.
Before even doing hormone assays to determine the concentrations of hormones in our samples, we first had to extract the hormone from the feces. This proved the most labor-intensive part of the whole process and amounted to about five days of thawing poop, weighing poop, heating poop, drying poop, grinding poop with a mortar and pestle, picking hairs out of poop, and…weighing it again. The goal is to get a pure sample of dried feces that, when combined in a known mass with a known volume of liquid, will give us a homogenous solution of hormones. Here are some of the steps we went through to turn hyena diarrhea into some pretty science-y looking tubes of extracted hormone…
\
In the beginning, this process was super cool to me. Five years after some hyena ate a zebra, here I was sitting in Nebraska seeing all those tiny black and white hairs in its poop and picking them out with the attention of a surgeon. But after doing this for more or less 12 hours a day, Sarah and I were starting to think our morning coffee grounds looked like poop (and wow, so perfectly mortared-and-pesteled!) and had the urge to weigh out a perfect .2 grams of that pepper before adding it our pasta. We were ready to reach the end of the extracting phase….
Voila! We do some chemistry and centrifuging magic with those dried samples and here’s that solution of hormones on the left. The rest of the stuff in our sample – all the stuff we don’t want – remains in the tube on the right.
After using some more fancy science tools that us field biologists don’t usually lay our hands on, like this multi-channel pipetter on the left, we are left with our final extracted product on the right. I swear, these little holders filled with just the precise quantity of yellowish sample, perfectly in solution, looked more beautiful than liquid gold. Now, on to the exciting part…finding out the concentration of corticosterone in each of those little tubes. This will help us determine how a hyena’s stress level is shaped by ecological, social, and physiological factors, as well as conservation management decisions.
And for this, us field folk get to feel even more like real, honest-to-god scientists by utilizing the properties of radioactive substances. We add an antibody to our extracted hormone as well as corticosterone tagged with a radioactive Iodine tracer. What this amounts to in the lab is adding various brightly-colored radioactive liquids to our precious tubes of extracted hormone in specific timed succession, giving us pretty test-tube racks like this…
Then, the hormone in our sample and this radioactive antigen compete for binding sights on the antibody. This is one of the highlights of the process because as the magic of “competitive binding” occurs within each of these tubes, you get to take a 2-hr break from pipetting and go grab some lunch. When you return, chemistry magic has happened… and I have never been this excited about basic chemistry principles in my life. We can then add another brightly colored liquid to our tubes to separate the radioactive-labeled hormone that has bound to the antibody from the hormone that has not. After adding this precipitant and centrifuging our tubes, we’ve successfully completed this separation.
And finally comes the most nerve-wracking step of the entire procedure…decanting. Imagine, after spending days extracting the hormones, and then many hours carefully pipetting small amounts of somewhat dangerous substances in and out of small containers, you manage to get each of these precious tubes safely in and out of the massive centrifuge. You’ve also managed to not spill anything and are trying not to think about just how much each of these little tubes actually costs if you were to sum up the price of all the different liquids you’ve added. Now comes the time when you put these tubes in a special holder, turn them upside down, and literally pour all the fancy chemicals you’ve added down the drain. For me, this was the most stressful step in the process. I always had a mental flash of all those valuable tubes crashing into the sink and having to start the whole thing over again!
...but not everything goes down the drain. What we are left with is a small pellet in each tube that can be read in a Gamma Counter to measure the amount of radioactivity. The higher the radioactivity, the more the radioactive hormone won out in our competitive binding battle and the less corticosterone there actually is in our fecal sample. By comparing our samples with various solutions of known standard concentration, we can determine precisely the amount of stress hormone in each of our samples.
In the coming months, we will be using these new data to address several questions in addition to the hypothesis that spotted hyenas can serve as an "indicator species" for the Mara ecosystem. For example, I will be asking whether hyenas living in areas within the Mara with different management strategies show different stress profiles. I will also be looking at the behavioral, physiological, and demographic consequences of maternal stress for mother-offspring relations and cub development. As these questions form the heart of my PhD research, you'll hear more about them in future blog posts...
My first foray into endocrine lab work would not have been possible without the help of the French Lab. Thanks to Dr. French for opening his doors to smelly hyena poop samples and all his guidance. Also, thanks to undergrad Benjamin Hochfelder in the French lab. Can you believe Ben came in on a weekend to help us grind and weigh poop!? Finally, Sarah and I want to give a huge thank you to Drew Bernie. Drew’s title is “lab tech” but his endless help and trouble-shooting abilities during our stay in Omaha quickly earned him the nickname “Superman.” Drew turned me from a pipette-naïve hyena watcher into an assay-machine and seemed to be able to put out any fire that Sarah and I started. Thanks, Drew!
Left: undergrad-extraordinaire Ben Hochfelder
Right: Drew didn’t want a commemorative photograph taken, but this picture pretty much sums him up.
But the road from watching a hyena poop to having usable data is a long one. This spring, before heading out to the Mara for my two-year field season, fellow grad student Sarah Jones and I packed up about 550 hyena fecal samples and headed to the University of Nebraska to see what our hyenas’ various bowel movements over the past six years or so could tell us. Sarah was analyzing samples for androgen levels (a class of hormones including testosterone). I analyzed samples for corticosterone – a main mammalian stress hormone.
After our precious cargo made it safely to Omaha (driving around with a back seat full of coolers of valuable poop is a bit unnerving), we learned from endocrine god Dr. Jeff French how to transform our stinky poop samples into PhD gold. Dr. French normally spends his time exploring the connections between hormones and behavior in marmoset monkeys and humans but takes a break every few years to help us process these more exotic poops transported all the way from the wilds of Africa.
Before even doing hormone assays to determine the concentrations of hormones in our samples, we first had to extract the hormone from the feces. This proved the most labor-intensive part of the whole process and amounted to about five days of thawing poop, weighing poop, heating poop, drying poop, grinding poop with a mortar and pestle, picking hairs out of poop, and…weighing it again. The goal is to get a pure sample of dried feces that, when combined in a known mass with a known volume of liquid, will give us a homogenous solution of hormones. Here are some of the steps we went through to turn hyena diarrhea into some pretty science-y looking tubes of extracted hormone…
Weighing out a precise quantity of feces
Drying out a hundred-or-so fecal samples overnight in an incubator
\
DO NOT drop this tray of incubated samples! Aren’t they colorful!? Dr. French and I think they look like spices set out in a Middle Eastern market.
In the beginning, this process was super cool to me. Five years after some hyena ate a zebra, here I was sitting in Nebraska seeing all those tiny black and white hairs in its poop and picking them out with the attention of a surgeon. But after doing this for more or less 12 hours a day, Sarah and I were starting to think our morning coffee grounds looked like poop (and wow, so perfectly mortared-and-pesteled!) and had the urge to weigh out a perfect .2 grams of that pepper before adding it our pasta. We were ready to reach the end of the extracting phase….
Voila! We do some chemistry and centrifuging magic with those dried samples and here’s that solution of hormones on the left. The rest of the stuff in our sample – all the stuff we don’t want – remains in the tube on the right.
After using some more fancy science tools that us field biologists don’t usually lay our hands on, like this multi-channel pipetter on the left, we are left with our final extracted product on the right. I swear, these little holders filled with just the precise quantity of yellowish sample, perfectly in solution, looked more beautiful than liquid gold. Now, on to the exciting part…finding out the concentration of corticosterone in each of those little tubes. This will help us determine how a hyena’s stress level is shaped by ecological, social, and physiological factors, as well as conservation management decisions.
And for this, us field folk get to feel even more like real, honest-to-god scientists by utilizing the properties of radioactive substances. We add an antibody to our extracted hormone as well as corticosterone tagged with a radioactive Iodine tracer. What this amounts to in the lab is adding various brightly-colored radioactive liquids to our precious tubes of extracted hormone in specific timed succession, giving us pretty test-tube racks like this…
Radioactive poop!
Then, the hormone in our sample and this radioactive antigen compete for binding sights on the antibody. This is one of the highlights of the process because as the magic of “competitive binding” occurs within each of these tubes, you get to take a 2-hr break from pipetting and go grab some lunch. When you return, chemistry magic has happened… and I have never been this excited about basic chemistry principles in my life. We can then add another brightly colored liquid to our tubes to separate the radioactive-labeled hormone that has bound to the antibody from the hormone that has not. After adding this precipitant and centrifuging our tubes, we’ve successfully completed this separation.
Tubes of radioactive poop about to be centrifuged
And finally comes the most nerve-wracking step of the entire procedure…decanting. Imagine, after spending days extracting the hormones, and then many hours carefully pipetting small amounts of somewhat dangerous substances in and out of small containers, you manage to get each of these precious tubes safely in and out of the massive centrifuge. You’ve also managed to not spill anything and are trying not to think about just how much each of these little tubes actually costs if you were to sum up the price of all the different liquids you’ve added. Now comes the time when you put these tubes in a special holder, turn them upside down, and literally pour all the fancy chemicals you’ve added down the drain. For me, this was the most stressful step in the process. I always had a mental flash of all those valuable tubes crashing into the sink and having to start the whole thing over again!
Pouring it all down the drain...
...but not everything goes down the drain. What we are left with is a small pellet in each tube that can be read in a Gamma Counter to measure the amount of radioactivity. The higher the radioactivity, the more the radioactive hormone won out in our competitive binding battle and the less corticosterone there actually is in our fecal sample. By comparing our samples with various solutions of known standard concentration, we can determine precisely the amount of stress hormone in each of our samples.
In the coming months, we will be using these new data to address several questions in addition to the hypothesis that spotted hyenas can serve as an "indicator species" for the Mara ecosystem. For example, I will be asking whether hyenas living in areas within the Mara with different management strategies show different stress profiles. I will also be looking at the behavioral, physiological, and demographic consequences of maternal stress for mother-offspring relations and cub development. As these questions form the heart of my PhD research, you'll hear more about them in future blog posts...
My first foray into endocrine lab work would not have been possible without the help of the French Lab. Thanks to Dr. French for opening his doors to smelly hyena poop samples and all his guidance. Also, thanks to undergrad Benjamin Hochfelder in the French lab. Can you believe Ben came in on a weekend to help us grind and weigh poop!? Finally, Sarah and I want to give a huge thank you to Drew Bernie. Drew’s title is “lab tech” but his endless help and trouble-shooting abilities during our stay in Omaha quickly earned him the nickname “Superman.” Drew turned me from a pipette-naïve hyena watcher into an assay-machine and seemed to be able to put out any fire that Sarah and I started. Thanks, Drew!
Left: undergrad-extraordinaire Ben Hochfelder
Right: Drew didn’t want a commemorative photograph taken, but this picture pretty much sums him up.
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