Hello,
everyone! My name is Connie Rojas and I am one of the graduate students in the
Holekamp lab! It has been a little over two weeks since I arrived in Kenya and
I am feeling a lot of emotions. Fortunate to be here, in the Maasai Mara
National Reserve, observing hyenas, and all of the other cool wildlife! Nervous
about starting my field project since time seems to evaporate and things never
go as planned. Excited to keep receiving my field training! I am getting better
at driving our stick-shift land cruisers in the Mara, identifying hyenas, and
knowing my way (I have no sense of direction). I am sad that my family is so
far away and that they will not get to visit and experience all of what I am experiencing.
Time here is precious, and I will try to get the most out of it!
A little bit
about me. I was born in Los Angeles, CA, grew up in rural, Southern Mexico, and
returned to LA when I was 9 years old. I resided in LA for all of middle school
and high school, and later attended Wellesley College in MA, where I received
my B.A. in Biological Sciences and Psychology. I am a mixture of a cellular
biologist and an ecologist, as most of my courses in undergrad were in
molecular biology, but in my summers, I travelled internationally to conduct
field work. After graduating, I spent close to a year following rhesus macaques
up and down cliffs in Cayo Santiago, PR.
I found their behavior and social interactions fascinating, and decided
that for graduate school, I also wanted to study a complex, social species like
these Old World monkeys. And here I am, a 3rd year PhD Student in
Dr. Kay Holekamp’s behavioral ecology lab! Like my training, my research has
both a molecular lab work and a field work component, and now, even a
computational biology/bioinformatics component! Yay! I study host-microbe
interactions, and the ways hyenas and their symbiotic microbes are affecting
each other. I believe microbes are performing critical functions for hyenas; I
just need to characterize them.
I am here in
the Mara for 4 more months for my field season and have 3 exciting projects I
am pursuing. One investigates how microbial communities change across different
stages of meat decomposition, in the savannah! This is such a fun job for
someone who has an irrational fear of all things worm-like, but thankfully, I
am slowly overcoming this fear. Another project involves the collection of
fecal samples from many of the animals here in Mara, not just hyenas, to
explore the forces that structure gut microbial communities in the wild. Is it
diet, is it their host’s evolutionary history, or is it something else? The
last project is my main field project, which evaluates the type of information
hyenas are obtaining from the scent gland secretions of other hyenas. The goal
is to present adult female hyenas with the secretions of two strangers (i.e. an
immigrant male & adult female), and document how long they spend sniffing
each specimen. If hyenas spend a differential amount of time sniffing the samples,
this indicates that scent gland secretions are indeed encoding different
information. I moving to Serena camp and starting this project next month; wish
me luck!
When I am not
going on observations (so fun!!), collecting feces, or “working” on my
dissertation research/data analysis, I am reading (Dee, I borrowed your
‘Walking with the Great Apes’ book but promise to leave it here for Kay),
obsessively posting pictures on my Instagram, and trying to help to the RAs with
whatever they need =) I am having a great time, and looking forward to building
more memories!
Until next time!
Now look at him! Those spots are fading...
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