 Nope, it's not a bit stuck. OK, just click. OK. So the up in Muscaga Bay, it's absolutely beautiful. Just has the most amazing views. And this is from, I believe, Harbor Island. And then this is a view of Hog Island and some different shots of Hog Island. We had beautiful week. It started out rainy, but the fog cleared and we had just beautiful time up there. The staff is absolutely incredible. This is Todd Gilman from Connecticut Audubon. And this is the whole staff. Kevin was the director of the camp. Kayla did some work on mindfulness. Amanda, Eva, the camp director, forgetting names. Juliet did some of the workshops as well. Todd Gilman, Margaret, and then Eric, who is also the caretaker of the island. They put together just an amazing week of programs. We took classes that were offered on all kinds of different things, from art to mindfulness, nature journaling. I took a lot of the classes on science, being a science teacher. So we had a walk about the coastal geology of the island, ornithology as well. We went back to the mainland briefly for a pond study and how to bring pond life live for kids, even in city areas. We talked about ways of incorporating that type of learning. At night we had an evening entomology. There were people from Immaculata College that were doing research for Audubon. They were actually helping document all the species and to update Hog Island in order to bring it online, all of their resources online. So in exchange for that, one professor and a couple of his undergrads were able to spend a couple of weeks out on the island and we benefited from them being there as well. And it wasn't all learning. We had some fun as well. On one of the first evenings, we had s'mores on the shore. We had a little campfire on the beach and got to roast some marshmallows. So it was a lot of fun. We did a walk around Hog Island. We did the longer walk, which was five miles all around the island to the far end. And it covered all kinds of different ecosystems. What was really interesting was at the end of the island was what they call the shell middens. And these were piles of shells that were left from centuries of Native Americans. And it completely changed the ecology of the end of the island to where milkweed could grow and it's an area where they see a lot of monarchs. And it kept the pine forest at bay, the spruce forest. We also did some exploring at the beaches and in the tide pools and that. So it was a lot of fun. We did some bird watching. And this is actually the spot that I went back to later in the week to get this next shot. There was a juvenile Merlin falcon that we could hear. And I was determined before I left that I would get it. And it showed up, it hung out on the branch and I got this shot on a burst shot as it took off. So I was so excited. I was like, okay, my week's complete. I got the Merlin falcon. The food was absolutely amazing. A lot of it locally sourced. We finished with a lobster dinner on the last night. But even the paella and some of the other fixings that Carter, the chef made were absolutely astounding and never went hungry. Everything was delicious. Met a lot of different teachers, made a lot of friends. We had a lot of fun exploring and sharing interests. Some of the teachers, everyone had something to share. As a marine biologist, I was kind of the resident expert on tide pools but other people knew mushrooms and mycology. Other people knew herbs and were pointing out different plants as we explored places. So it was fun for all and we learned a ton of information. The highlight was the boat trip to Egg Rock. Egg Rock is where 50 years ago, Steve Kress started the seabird program to restore puffins and turns nesting on the island. And it is a phenomenal success story and we got to go out to Egg Rock. And this is actually an Audubon observer on the island who is looking at birds coming back to their nests and seeing which ones are feeding. So this was really cool shot. I love the fact that I could actually see the person on the island. And there were all kinds of gulls and turns and it was almost overwhelming, the noise coming from all the different birds that were there. And this was a greater sheer water that we were fortunate to spot. And of course, some puffins and a cormorant drying its wings and more puffins. And of course, puffins, which is why everyone loves going out to Egg Rock. And it was just a phenomenal week. I learned a lot about different aspects of outdoor education. And it was really inspirational to learn from these other teachers as well to see people the beginning of their career and the end of their career coming together to learn more, to share our knowledge and to then take it back to the people that we work with. And some of the teachers were elementary, others taught all ages as Ted Gilman said from pre-K to gray. And so to be able to bring this interest to my students and at Wells Junior High, I'm trying to get a Young Birders Club going. I have a couple of students from last year that are interested as soon as they get done with the play this week. And another couple of new students coming aboard. So I'm hoping to be able to do things with them and get them excited about birds as well. And as we left the island, we've been due to Hog Island. Everyone was kind of disappointed that we had to leave, but we found out that they have a volunteer program that if you're the friends of Hog Island, you can apply to return as a visitor. So I might be returning next summer as a volunteer if I can. And I wanna thank especially York County Audubon for sponsoring me so that I could make a dream come true and just really enjoyed my whole week there. Thank you so much, Christine. That was wonderful. Great. Did you take the pictures? Are those? I didn't work for the other birds. Yeah, they were lovely shots, lovely shots. So thank you. And on to our main program for this evening, IVN and Maisie Meurs are two doctoral candidates at UMO and have been working for several years on small mammals. And we're delighted to have Ivy here with us tonight to share with us the work she's been doing and fascinating stuff about small mammals in the forest. This is a great crowd. I'm really excited to be sharing some of our research here today. I just wanted to check that everyone can hear me in the back of the room. And then I'm sure everyone can hear me on Zoom. Perfect, okay. So this is one of the first times that I'm gonna be talking to people that aren't within my specific department. So if there's any point in here where you're like, that is a word you haven't used before and I don't know what that word means, please explain, just stop me and I'd be more than happy to pause and explain myself so that you guys are on the same page with me. So I, as Bill so warmly welcomed me, I'm a PhD student at the University of Maine. I'm in the Wildlife Department and my advisor, Dr. Alessio Mortolitti is the head of this entire project and really like the big wig. And Maisie is one of my, I guess my lab mates is what we call each other and we work on very, very similar things. And so one of the big goals that I wanted to, I guess aim for during this presentation is to convince you that what we're doing is important. And then as soon as I came in, I was like, actually this is probably not the crowd that I need to convince, but maybe this is the crowd that I can get a little bit more excited about what it is we're doing. And to show you, small mammals are cool, but maybe they're cooler than birds. I don't know. We'll see at the end of this. Okay, so the first question that I really wanted to ask you guys first is to think back, Christine, this is a perfect time for you. And if you were to ask your middle school biology students, like how does a forest come to be? Then let's say we take out a whiteboard and you start writing out characteristics on there. Maybe you'd say, oh, the local geography, this kind of seasonality that's happening there, that's gonna determine what kinds of things are gonna live in the forest. Think about soil characteristics, precipitation, all these kinds of things. But these factors aren't explaining how they got there in the first place. So how do they move there? As far as I know, trees don't have legs. They can probably spread out a little bit, but how did they get there in the first place? And so this is one of the biggest questions that we look at is seed dispersal. So how do plants move? How do they get to where they need to go? Because one of the biggest things for a plant in their lifetime is this single opportunity in their life for them to be able to move farther away, for them to find and colonize a new place, for them to spread out their genes, all these wonderful things. And so plants, as you would imagine then, have evolved a whole host of strategies in order to move. So up here on the left are some maple seeds. They've evolved wings so that they can stay airborne, they can stay aloft for a lot longer, they can move farther. Other seeds are ballistic. These seed pods have evolved this tension and pressure within the seed pod so that as soon as some kind of small stimuli hits them, in this case, this one's falling on the ground, they can move farther. I don't know if anyone's heard of a sandbox tree, but that one can spit out seeds as far as the length of a football field. So it's kind of amazing. And obviously you can tell how important this are. Burrs, I'm sure you've gotten some of this fall as you're walking through the forest. You're like, oh, I'm accidentally helping this plant disperse its seeds, but that was a strategy from the first place. But one of the most important evolved strategies are seed producing plants that rely on animals and birds to eat their seeds and then to take them farther away. And in fact, it's estimated that approximately 50 to 90% of all seed producing plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds. So one of the most important animal dispersers are small mammals. And hopefully that's why you're here for this talk is because you also think they're very important for forest ecology. So this is animals such as squirrels, chipmunks, mice, and voles. No doubt you've seen chipmunks in your yard stuffing their cheek pouches full of birdseeds that you just put out in the birdhouse. Or maybe you've seen viral videos of acorns pouring out of the houses of someone's wall of these acorn stashes of these red squirrels. So no doubt you can see that they're very important seed dispersers and seed predators. They can handle thousands of seeds in a given season. And we also know that in certain places, furred seed could be harvested up to 95% just by small mammals. So they're pretty insane. So they can play this role simultaneously, but it's a really interesting dilemma then for the plant because the seed needs to entice the animal enough that they're like, oh, this is something valuable that I'm gonna take and eat. But maybe not so much that they're gonna eat them right away. And so to prove this point, seeds have evolved various defenses like hard shells and bitterness and early germination so that they can escape predation from these small mammals. And so it's a really delicate balance but it's something that's really important to study for to understand what this relationship is between animals and plants. Ah, oh, this is my favorite graphic that I made but I missed it. But anyway, so this is saying is that if you are a seed disperser, you're gonna be a positive effect on a plant but if you're a seed predator, you're gonna be antagonistic. So negative positive, there's somewhere on the spectrum, which side are they on? What's their relationship? And so it'll be these combined actions of these small mammals that are going to decide what the composition of the seed bank is going to be, forest germination rates and then regeneration rates and then what is the future composition of our forests going to look like? So before I get too much farther, I'm gonna try to help us all get into the mind of a small mammal with a very seasonal analogy. So if you think back to when you were in primary school, you have the perfect costume ready. You're ready to go this weekend. You've got your bag, it's nice and empty and you're sitting down and you're trying to strategize where and what houses am I going to get to? So you're obviously gonna avoid the dentist house because toothpaste has no nutritional value. You're not gonna go there. Your neighbor's house, they always give out milk does and you just got your braces in. So maybe you're not gonna go to that house either. Your best friend's house, they always have king-sized candy bars. So they're like amazing, right? But their decorations are always a little bit too realistic. They're kind of scary. You're a little bit of a, you know, a scaredy cat. So maybe you're not gonna go there after all. And so the point of this analogy is that small mammals are very much kind of in the same mindset, especially during the fall where they're really racing against time to be able to forage and get enough food to survive their winter. And so they're balancing costs and risks in order for them to, you know, take advantage of these resource patches. So if I extend this even more, and maybe this is too much, but I'm just so excited because it's Halloween soon. So after a hard night's work, you sit down on your bedroom floor, you pour out all of your candy and you're looking at your candy and you're trying to strategize, okay, how am I gonna protect this stash of candy? And you know, there's candy predators all in the house. You've got three different siblings and one of them loves the same kinds of candy. You like, you also have parents and they also love candy even though they say it's not good for you. You know, they sneak from your stash too. So what are you gonna do? Are you gonna try to hide them in maybe your dresser or maybe you're going to put them on your backpack because nobody looks in your backpack or maybe you should keep them all together so that you can defend them. And so these are the kinds of things that small mammals are also thinking about and also things that they have to contend with. What are they gonna prioritize? Where are they gonna put the things that they worked so hard to collect and how are they gonna defend them? And so bringing this back into the small mammal world now, there are typically two different kinds of boarding strategies. There are your larger hordes and your scatter hoarders and your larger hoarders are those ones that put all of their candy in one basket. So that is like the American Red Squirrel. Just like Christine was saying earlier, that was amazing though. It was the oyster shell middens. So American Red Squirrels also, oh, they also have middens. Oh, okay, it's just, I'll just, okay. And so what they're doing is they are saying, I am a scary thing. I can make really loud noises. I'm very active. I can defend this cache. And so that's why they have these giant, giant middens. And then on the other hand, you have these scatter hoarders that aren't maybe so able to defend their caches. So then they rely on the concealment of these small tiny caches and their low density to protect their caches. So if you've seen these gray squirrels, they'll hide like one nut at a time and they rely on their memory to find them. And so the point I'm trying to make here is that hoarding strategies are really important. It's going to help you survive over a time where there is less food and there's different ways that you can handle this kind of situation. So from the plant's perspective though, it's much more beneficial to be picked up by a scatter hoarder rather than by a larder hoarder. Because if you're picked up by a larder hoarder, that seed is gonna either go underground where there's no light or you're gonna be competing with thousands of other seeds which isn't a great place for you to germinate. But a scatter hoarder, they might actually be doing something called directed dispersal where you're bringing the seed far away and putting it in like a very optimal place for germination. Maybe you're sticking it in like a little bit of moss so that's like a little bit of hydration and maybe it's up on a stump where you're farther away from some competing plants. So from the plant's perspective, the scatter hoarder is kind of your best bet to get further. But what's really interesting is like even if we think about gray squirrels and red squirrels and we're saying we're gonna categorize them as this and as that, there's actually still a spectrum that exists within animal species. So there are some red squirrels that actually will scatter hoarder a little bit and you will actually maybe not gray squirrels. That's a bad example. But many, many other small mammals are going to be on a spectrum. They're going to have large caches in some places that they're gonna defend and then maybe lots of little tiny caches. And so the point here is that like in trying to understand what the relationship is and whether they're going to help and aid in dispersal is we really need to look more because they exist on a spectrum. What are the things that are gonna change how they're gonna react to a seed? So let's start from the beginning. This is a little bit complicated, but it's very easy when I run you through it. What happens when an animal comes upon a seed is that they first have to make many decisions. But their first decision is, am I gonna ignore the seed or am I gonna harvest the seed? If they harvest the seed, are they gonna cash it? Are they gonna store it somewhere else or are they gonna eat it right away? If they decide to cash it, how far away are you going to take it? Where are they gonna take it? And then when are they gonna come back to recover it? So here, each of these decisions are gonna be, are gonna have huge implications on the seed. If you ignore the seed, so it stays close to that parent plant, it can't go very far. It's competing against all these other seeds that the parent plant has made. If you're eating right away or if you're recovered, then there's no chance for you to survive, right? So this is not good for your seed. But if you are harvested, cached and then not recovered, and that's the key here, you're not recovered, then that's very good for the seed. And normally this happens either because the animal forgets where the seed is or they die before they're able to recover it. But this is really the key point here is in this small section of decisions, this is where that strategy for a seed to be taken by an animal is working. So this decision tree, which depicts the seed dispersal process is really what our lab is really interested in fleshing out. And what factors are gonna change how an individual is going to take the seed through the process. And so we know that there's lots of extrinsic and intrinsic factors that are going to affect the process. We know that forest structure affects the probability of whether they're going to harvest or ignore the seed. If it's very, very open canopy, it's very risky. So they're less likely to harvest seeds. We know that luminosity makes a difference. The brighter the moon is, the more likely that there's going to be predators that are active and that can see you. So you're also less likely to select. We know that there's things like the seed density and availability, the more seeds that are available, the richer the resource patch, so the more likely they're gonna be there. We also know that there's lots of intrinsic factors. So what exactly are the traits of the seed? And then what exactly are the traits of the animal itself? And so as you can imagine, each one of these factors can yield a lot of different types of, a lot of research just from one. And as computing power is getting better and as technology advances and as more investment is being made, we are getting a little bit of a clear picture of exactly what the role of a small mammal is in seed dispersal. So where is it that they are on the spectrum? But what I'm here to say is that there is something that's very often overlooked that we think is really important. And hopefully I'll be able to convince you at the end of this presentation that you also think it's something that's important to consider. And that's personality. But what exactly is personality? And how can you define it in an animal? We can't give them a pen and paper to tell them to take a Myers-Briggs test. And we also can't invite them to group therapy to talk about their feelings. So how do you prove that a dog is jealous or that a cat is embarrassed? And are we anthropomorphizing them? Are we perhaps wrongfully projecting our own feelings onto them? But I'd argue, and many other people would as well, personality doesn't have to be so complicated. In essence, personality is just consistent behavioral patterns. And we can parse it down into just two axes. And so then it's not so hard to imagine that all animals actually have personalities. So on this axis here, you have a high arousal and a low arousal where an animal or a person or whatever it is that you're looking at is going to react very strongly or they're not going to react at all. And then on the second axis, you have a negative or a positive valence. They're going to react positively or they're going to react negatively. And so if we just give an example of a dog meeting a stranger, if it's a golden retriever, where are they going to be? I would guess in the upper right-hand corner, they're going to have positive valence and high arousal. Yes, oh my gosh, all the way up there. Say it's a dog who has had... I couldn't think of a great example because it's really sad, but let's just say they were abandoned and they're scared or they were abused by people before. Maybe they would be more on the top left side. Maybe someone who is a service dog, they are so used to strangers, it's like they're every day. Maybe they're down in the bottom right or maybe the bottom left. But the idea here is that we can already just see very easily without having to ask them any questions, without having them to speak English, we can see that they have personalities. And my favorite pastime is to find videos of animal personalities and hopefully this works. But this is two types of dogs. You have the dogs that love water. And then you have the dogs that hate the water. So it's very obvious here. Hopefully, I'm not going to ask for a raise of hands because I'm just going to assume that I did a great job. Okay, so personality is consistent behavioral variation across time, across context. If you're a social butterfly, you're going to talk to people at work. You're going to talk to people at the grocery store. You're going to talk to people five years from now. If you're shy, you're going to be the opposite of that. And we know now that personality exists in every single taxa. We found it in worms. We found it in insects. We found it in birds. We found it in fish. It exists every time we try to look for it. We also know that it's heritable. And we also are starting to say, what are the effects of personality? So now we're going to throw that question out out of the window. We don't really care. We know it's a given. Animals have personality. But what does that mean? And why does it exist? We know that they have effects. They prefer different diets. They prefer different habitats. They prefer to interact with different kinds of things and to be active at different kinds of day. But what does that mean? What are the ecological consequences of personality? And so traits like boldness, exploration, activity, aggression, anxiety, these are all things that we're investigating to say, why do they exist? What is the purpose? And what does it mean? Especially for the population and for the health of the species. So the important point here is that not all individuals are the same. They differ in all of these different kinds of traits. Personalities are found in all taxa, not by chance. They exist because different individuals are better adapted to different environments. And so from a conservation standpoint, if we're trying to conserve a species, we need to conserve not just genetic variation but also behavioral variation. So understanding the role of personality can also help us predict how individuals vary in their contribution to ecosystem functions. If we take into account our changing world, this is getting a little heavy, but the impacts of rapid climate change, deforestation, urbanization, some of these things might be affecting portions of the population much more heavily than other portions of the population. So if you think of how personalities are differentially moving or using parts of the habitat, you can think that those parts of the habitat might be degrading faster. And if these certain individuals are the ones that are disproportionately, I guess, playing those ecosystem functions or those ecological roles, then this might be a problem. So to give you a little bit more of a visual for this, if the behavioral composition of populations are altered, it may mean that ecosystems services, in this case, seed dispersal that we rely on might dwindle more quickly than we would expect. So for small mammals, some individuals may be more mutualistic, others might be more antagonistic. And as we think about how to conserve these natural systems and maintain a healthy population, we'll need to consider the parts that make up the whole because they're not always equivalent. So now that we've set the stage a little bit for how important this is to look at, I wanted you to finally reap the benefits of coming to this talk and learn about small mammals and find some cute faces here. So this on the right here is a juvenile deer mouse and he's gray because he's a juvenile, but as he gets older, he's gonna get a little bit more brown and a little bit more orange. And what's really cool about them is you can tell the difference from them. So they're sometimes called forest mice because their belly is white and that's very, very different from house mice. And it's thought that the reason that they're colored this way is the same way fish are kind of lighter on the bottom and darker on the top because they're arboreal. If you look at them from the top and they have a whiter belly, they're more likely to not be seen. And then fun trivia, it's thought that this species is what inspired Walt Disney to draw Mickey Mouse. This is a redback vole, Myody's Gaparai. They're very frugivorous, very grinivorous and they're called the redback vole because they have this really beautiful rustic brown band from their front down to their back. And this one is drinking a little bit of water from moss and this guy here is the short-tailed shrew, Blorena Brevacata. He is not a grain of ore but I wanted to show you this small mammal because he is very, very interesting. He's one of the few venomous mammals in the world and they actually do caching behavior. They can paralyze their insect prey and cache them alive so they can eat them later. And there are these like crazy voracious insectivores if you ever get bitten by one, which I have, I'm very sorry because they'll just paralyze your arm for like a week, they're just crazy. So I wanted to kind of introduce you to the project that we've been working on and kind of what we've been doing. So for the past, I guess eight years now in central Maine at the Penobscot experimental forest we've been running a really big project to understand small mammal personality and what is happening in the forests that they live in. So the Penobscot experimental forest is a really cool compartmental forest where different parts of the forest have been managed differently in terms of logging and silver culture. So that researchers can kind of see what are the different silver culture practices doing for forest regeneration? How does it change? How does these cutting practices change what is gonna happen five or 10 or 20 years from now? And so we work in three different managed units. We work in an even-aged forest where a lot of the trees are the same age and they're actually quite small. It's very, very dense study site. We also work in a two-stage shelter hood where it's very similar to the even age but they retain these really big large trees. And then we also worked, which is very rare in Maine in an unmanaged forest. It hasn't been touched since, I think the 1800s. And so some of those trees are hundreds of years old and it's clearly a very, very different landscape from the even age in the two-stage shelter hood and they're only a few kilometers apart from each other. So it's the same population but we're looking at forest structure and how that also affects personality. What kind of personalities live in these different kind of habitats and what are the things that are changing their demographic composition? And so at our study site, these are the animals that we trap, some of them and we use two different kinds of traps here. The top one is a Tomahawk trap and the bottom one here is a Longworth trap which my advisor likes to call the Cadillac of small mammal traps. It's really cool. So there's two different compartments. There's this compartment here which is the chopping mechanism but then here, this is the housing compartment and you can see that it's angled upward so that even when it rains, they're not gonna get wet, which is really great. And in here, you can put bedding, you can put all kinds of food stuff in here. We like to say this is the best meal that they're ever gonna get in their life. We put sunflower seeds and peanut butter and oats in there so they get carbs, protein, all the things that they want. So these are the ways that we trap them and you're already familiar with these top three species but we also catch red squirrels, chipmunks and we also get shrews. I don't know if you've ever seen them but some of these shrews are only three grams large. So just three paper clips. They're so small. And I think one of my favorite papers, one of my favorite scientific papers is about these guys because they have to eat every four hours or they're going to die. They live on this like crazy metabolic tightrope where since they're so small and so active, they need to eat so frequently. And I just can't imagine how something like that can survive like and exist. That's just insane to me. But yes, so that is how we trap our animals. Once we get them, we run them through a couple of different things. First, we take lots of data from them. Of course, this is how they pay their rent from when they came into the trap. So we take their weight, their sex, their stage of reproduction and then we give them little microchips just like the same that your dog or your cat gets from your vets. So we can scan them and we know exactly who that individual is. But just in case that doesn't work, we also give them unique ear tags and we also give them little haircuts so that we can visually identify, yes, this is individual A. And so these are all the kinds of things that we're doing out in the field after we trap them. Now that we've captured our animals, how do we measure their personality? So here I've showed two different tests that we run and these are quite popular in the animal personality world. So this first one is called the emerging test. We've put an animal into a clean trap so we assume that this is a relatively safe space for them. And then we wait and time how long it takes for them to come out. And you can imagine, this is actually really scary because they were literally lifted up into the air placed into some strange box and then you're gonna expect them to come out, especially after, you know, there's, I'm opening the door, you know, like they're gonna come out. Some of them never come out. Some of them shoot out while your hand is still on the door. So even that is just such a crazy difference in behavior and personality that you see that some are just so much more risk averse. Some of them just don't care, they're just gonna go for it. And then the second test we run is a open field test and it's called an open field test because it's an open field. It's used in a lot of pharmacological studies, but we built our own and we put it out into the field and put our mice into it. And the idea here is to measure traits such as exploration behavior, activity, we see how far they run, how fast they run, how much they're trying to jump up on the side of the board here. And so here's an example of a mouse. This is the deer mouse, this is an adult. He's grooming here now. That's also a personality variable that we take. That's kind of a stress variable. He's rearing up on the sides here. We kind of interpret this as exploration. And what's really interesting here is you can see he's kind of sticking to the side of the box because that's sacred. They have one protective side, but I think so often he'll cross into the middle and that is something that we interpret as boldness. You're more protected on the side of the box. So when you cross through the center, that's a risk-taking personality behavior. And so this is kind of to give you an idea of what the foundational data set that we are working with is. We're describing what animals live in our study sites and what and who are they. And so I just wanted to introduce you really quickly. I won't read all of this, but basically this is our team and these are the kinds of questions that we're asking. One of the most recent studies that has been done was Bridget Humphrey's who looked at pilfering behavior and personality. So do certain kinds of personalities steal more? Are they more likely to steal from other people's caches? And she did find a result. Maisie Merz, who is supposed to be here today, but hopefully I'm filling in her shoes a little bit. She right now is working on a foraging pattern experiment where she's putting out seeds and trying to see, are there different kinds of personalities that are more efficient foragers? Alison Brem, who's been really pivotal in the, I guess the start of this project. She was the first graduate student on this project. Has looked at a lot of things. She has proven many of them, which I'll get into a little bit later just so that you guys can see some results. But these are the kinds of questions that we're asking. I don't think I have very much time left or I just wanted to see before I get too far into this. I'm okay, okay. All right, but this is model seed experiment. And since I'm here, you're gonna listen to my seed experiment. So one of the coolest questions I think is trying to understand how personality is going to play out in the face of climate change. So right now, well, I guess we're not in central Maine, but central Maine at the middle there is at the northern range limit of 64 different plant species. And so as climate change happens, this range that these species are able to live in, this is called the habitable range, is going to shift. It's gonna shift northwards. It's gonna shift to higher elevations. But seeds that are very large, so hickories, oaks, they're going to need animals to move them. And if they don't move them, then these 64 species might go extinct. And so this is kind of the question that I'm looking at is as these seeds start to move up north and meet populations that have never seen these seeds before, are there going to be certain personalities that are more likely to disperse these new seeds that they've never seen before? So I would guess that it's the ones that are less scared of new things, maybe the ones that are more exploratory that are gonna pick up these seeds and move them. And so what's important about this study is that, well, I think I've already said it, but it's really important. I think what I'm trying to get at is, what are the things that we really need to look at for our populations to predict whether these species are going to continue to exist? Because we can say, yeah, there's squirrels. Yes, there's mice. Of course, these seeds are going to move up, but it's gonna be that velocity. If that habitable range is moving faster than the individuals are picking them up and learning them, then maybe it's those front runners, those ones at the very, very front that say, yes, I can use that seed. That's something I can use that are going to change the, I guess the trajectory of whether that plant is going to survive or not. Oh, animation, more animation. Okay, so this is my setup. I put out a motion triggered camera on a bunch of seeds that I picked. Oh, I did not introduce you to them. I use lots of different acorns here. And they're, let's see. We know rubra is and macroparka, they're both found in the native seeds, but these four here are one of the 64 seedlings that are at the northern range limit expecting to move north. And so these are the seeds that I'm putting out. I put them underneath the camera so that I can see exactly what are the mice and bulls and squirrels doing with the seeds? Which ones are they interacting? Which ones are they selecting? And then I put an RFID reader antenna around it so that I can read that microchip. I know what their personality is when they come up to this seed. I also paint the seeds and then dust fluorescent powder around the board so that once that seed is taken out of the frame of the camera, I can still track and find exactly what happened to that seed. I know how far away it went. I know what kind of habitat it was cached in. And if I put another camera on that seed, then I know how long it took them to recover that seed. So this is the meat of the project here. This is how we collect the data. Oh yeah. Is the, does it know that stuff bothered the animals? Oh, the color. Yes, it doesn't. I did a separate experiment where I put like nothing in the middle and they still came to get the seeds. So there was no difference in the number of visits between whether it was painted and whether it was powdered. But yeah, it's a great question because it's so bright. You would think like, oh my gosh, how could they possibly decide to come? So I actually have to run these experiments at night because I can't track fluorescent things during the day. So they actually, I mean, I'm assuming they can't see these colors at night but maybe I guess, no, it's not, yeah. Yes, it doesn't matter. So these are kinds of what it looks like when you go out at three or four a.m. in the morning and you're trying to find these tiny little mouse footprints and follow them to their little treasure chests. So on the left here is a crazy network of what was a flying squirrel that came to the station and took every single seed and then in like a web had stashed one seed under a pile of leaves, like every six, there are 16 seeds on the tray and each one of those was cached exactly the same way. This in the middle here is, I believe, a three acorn cache. So you can see that it's already different. There, some of them are putting them together, some of them aren't. And then this is a video of what it looks like to actually track a trail. This one is a pretty impressive trail. It's very significant, which makes me feel that this individual has been coming back and forth on the same trail from their burrow back to the seed tray station. And then here, this is their burrow. We have marked it here. There was a seed there. And then they've also cached, I don't know if you saw it. I didn't pause it quick enough, but there was also another seed cached right near the mouth of their burrow. So those are already two very different micro habitats that they're caching these seeds in. So here's some videos of what mice do with their seeds. This one is what I call a window shopper. He's like, I can't really decide. I don't know if I really need it. I had them only. And so he's tasting them all before he decides that, you know what, maybe I will take this one. Yeah, and so what's really impressive is that these acorns can be six grams large, whereas a mouse could be maybe 25 grams large. So it's 25% of their weight. It's very heavy. It is scary to be a tiny mouse that everything in the world wants to eat. You're just like this tiny meatball in the environment and you're gonna grab this thing and like lift up your head and move around with it. That's scary. So that's already something that I am so impressed with. This one is, I guess, let's see. I don't know what I would call this one, let's see. Maybe the researcher. I'd call this the researcher. He's like, this can't decide, but then they do. And then this one is that one rare individual that walks to the back of the aisle, the shop of the supermarket, grabs milk, and then that's it. So they know what they want, much less picky. And then this is that short-tailed barina, the short-tailed shrew. They are not grain of ores, but for some reason I got a video of one of them trying to grab a seed. And you can see that it is not easy for him. He just like, cannot get it. He doesn't have the teeth. I don't know why he's here, but it's already just so cool how quickly some of them can pick them up, but you can see he wants it. He just can't get it. Yeah, and then he gives up. So I'm sure as you can imagine, doing fieldwork can sometimes be a little bit messy and things happen that you don't expect and things come to your seed stations that you also don't expect. So those are the footprints of this animal that came to my station. Yes. Just love them. It's big mouth. And he's coming back for more. Yeah, I wish there was some sound on this video because you can hear very satisfying crunches happening, but very cute. Another guy I had a contend with and fight with, you can see I tried to put a cage around my stations at one point, but these guys were way too smart for me. And I just, in the end, I could never win over them. This is a raccoon. So I built this cage where the opening is like this large and they are still able to stick their whole arm in there and then they just jump the whole thing over. Yes, very smart. So I wanted to leave some time for questions. So I'm gonna go a little bit quickly through the results and then we can spend more time on these if you actually have questions about them. But so we know that the lower your anxiety, the farther away you're gonna take your seed. Like this has been proven. This is what we have seen. We also know that there's a big variation in mice on that spectrum of mutualistic to antagonistic. And these are summed up scores over the entire season. So a mouse comes, comes, comes. We score every single one of their interactions and then this is an average. So on average, this individual is always mutualistic. That individual is always antagonistic. So we can see there's a huge variation. Now, let's add personality onto there. And we can see that ones that are more timid are going to be more antagonistic. And so the ones that are less timid are the ones that are more likely to aid this seed and dispersal. So if we're thinking again back into our behavioral composition, if the ones that are less timid are the ones that are living in habitats that we're degrading more, then we're not going to see as many mutualistic interactions as we would expect. So hopefully having gone over these results and all of these things, I have convinced you that small mammals are vital for forests. Personality affects decisions at these key stages of the seed dispersal process. And that if we're going to conserve a population, if we're going to conserve a species, if we're going to conserve an ecosystem, we can't only just be thinking about biological diversity or genetic diversity, but we also need to be thinking about behavioral diversity. And before I end, I want to thank everyone, of course, my advisor, Alessio Morolini, all the graduate students in my lab, the many, many field technicians and volunteers that come out to help with this study, as well as our funding sources. And then lastly, oh, happens. Don't know where that came from. I just created this beautiful clip of a camera that I had put onto a 14 acorn stash that this mouse made. And so I put it up for like a month. So you'll be able to see what is happening. So this is November 11th, 2021. And this guy has come back to his stash to check out what's going on. So it's raining and he's come back. The stash is right in the middle. He's covering it with leaves. And now it's the 28th, it's the first frost. That's one acorn he's gonna take. The same night, he's gonna take another one. And then the day after, and there's nothing left in the cache anymore. Hold on, hold on. Yeah, so that's it. I know. So right now I'm analyzing the data from this one. And I am finding that there is a personality variable which is latency to emerge. It's that, do you remember the emergence test and then coming out of the box? The ones that took longer to come out of the box, this is also very preliminary. So don't repeat this outside of this. It hasn't been double checked yet by reviewers or anybody. But what I'm finding is the ones that are taking longer to come out of the box are less likely to take any acorn at all. Like all, they're just less likely to take all of them. It's just scary. They're heavy acorns, except for the two native species. So they're more familiar with them, I think. And they're more likely to take a risk on those acorns. So that's something I'm finding now. But yeah, it's exciting. I'm writing it up as we speak. So hopefully I can send it to everybody soon. But after this, I'm really interested in competition. So interest specific, interest specific competition. Because what I'm interested in is personality must not just be something that exists relative to your own population, right? We know that there are different personalities that choose to live in different kinds of communities of small mammals. So there are bold ones that are, let's see, bold mice are more likely to overlap the territory of American red squirrels. So then what I'm thinking is, what is all, like, how does that all come together? I don't know. I haven't fleshed this out very much clearly. But that's something I'm interested in, is how does competition come all into this personality kind of thing? Oh, do you wanna follow up? No, I have a question. Oh. Predators on the noise. Yes. In some of your study areas, do you have resident owls, for example? I don't believe we have resident owls. I have seen owls in our places before. And what's really interesting is we tried to do a predation study before. And owls are just so scary to all of them that there kind of isn't any variation in how they react to them. That as soon as you play an owl call, all of them react the same way. It's just so scary. But Maisie actually just did a study on predators. She looked at coyotes and bobcats and weasels and fishers and what else is there? I think those are the raccoons. Those are the main ones. And she looked at the density of these predators in our sites to see if it related to personality at all. And it did, which is really interesting. The ones that are more bold are more likely to be active and live in those kinds of environments rather than the other ones. Yeah. Yeah. Do you see any like some of the owls that are like some animals that are other than owls? Ooh. Or like say, for example, the raccoon, the raccoon that she typically likes, what was the dog that she visited last time when the owls were gone? Ooh. That's an interesting question. I would guess there probably is maybe not. It's something that not a lot of people actually look into. I think, I don't know, American culture, I've been told that American culture and research were like very focused on competition. Like we love that like good guy, bad guy kind of thing. So not a lot of symbiosis research is happening. But I can imagine a lot of those things are probably like not on purpose. Like if someone, let's say, I don't know, what is the first species that might, I don't know, let's say a raccoon is the first one to come to that station. Maybe if it's a time of acorn fall, some kind of species is following the scent of the raccoon to find these like rich resource patches. And so they're using cues and maybe there's symbiosis there. I'm not sure. But yeah, we do know that within species, they cooperate, especially for the winter because small mammals are so small, they actually have to huddle together in the winter in order to survive. So American red squirrels actually, they huddle together in the winter, which is surprising because you can't imagine that they would do that. But they've actually proven that there's like a hormonal change in their body that allows them to be less aggressive and able to socialize with each other. And so they have to, which is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. What's the lifespan of some of these people? Yeah, some of them are very small. So a mouse probably lives one year, I would say. A red squirrel probably lives three or four years. So they're very, very small. Yeah, they don't have a lot of time to live. The longest lived, yeah, is probably the gray squirrel. I would estimate. I have a good question. Yeah. Do you find a pattern between generations like if you've got a old abrasion creature, is the next generation gonna be like that? Yeah, so we know that personality is heritable. So it is more likely that their offspring will be whatever it is that it is. But that's a really interesting question because we're trying to look at how it changes, like how the composition of behavior changes over time. Like does it remain consistent or does it shift? And if it shifts, why is it shifting? We have eight years of data. So that's something that we're really interested in looking at. So that's a great question. Yeah. You mentioned that one of the personality components understand how human structures and the environment might affect different mammals in different areas because of their personality. You can describe what kind of needs of certain kind of personality comes. Yes. Let's, what kind of, sorry, could you repeat the last part? Just wondering if you could give an example of the system where our personality will be exhibit of the whole of this personality which is represented in it. Yeah, let's see. I'm gonna try to think of the best personality example I can think of. Let's see for, oh, okay. Well, I mean, I guess I can use the same, I guess the same species here. So we've done a micro habitat study on these guys where different personalities prefer different kinds of micro habitats. I don't remember the specifics, but I would hazard to say that it was bold ones that are more likely to live in open canopy rather than in closed canopy. So civil culture, Maine does a ton of logging. If we are logging so much that there's only one kind of micro habitat available that they're all open and they're not closed, you're only gonna have those bold individuals then where do the shy ones go to live? So that's kind of the idea is like there needs to be a balance of these, like when we're managing a forest for timber or for whatever it is, like how are we going to manage it so that there is a diversity of habitats within there so that a diversity of individuals can live in there? Does that answer your question? Okay. Yeah. Yes. Have you looked at like maybe like mating of the animals, whether it's kind of a preference, like cold, you know. Ooh, that would be like sexual selection. Yes. Yes. Do opposites attract or not? This would be a really great study. I, yeah, I haven't looked at that but that would be really interesting to see. I will pose this to my lab mates and see if anyone that wants to take this to see. Well, thank you so much. Cool. And thanks for joining us tonight and check out our Zoom only program for next month. And hopefully we'll see you then. Yes, questions? Yes, this has been recorded and will be posted. So if you wanna take another look, it will be there or share it with someone else. So thank you very much and good night.