Our research interests
We strive to understand why animals eat what they eat. We then use their foraging behavior as a lens to study individual animals, species’ populations, and entire ecosystems .
Current Research Projects
The structure and organization animal communities ultimately arises from innumerable behavioral decisions by their constituent individual organisms. Where individual organisms choose to go influences local diversity and abundance; what they choose to eat alters food-web structure. We’re exploring whether building this behavioral focus into studies and theories at the community level can lead to deeper insights about the mechanistic basis of community functioning. Focusing on Gorongosa National Park’s large herbivore community and in collaboration with Montana State University, we’re asking how individual movement decisions shape short- and medium-term community composition; how intraspecific differences in habitat selection shape interspecific niche overlap; and how differences among individuals in space use leads to ecosystem heterogeneity.
In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park as well as protected and agricultural lands in California, we use DNA metabarcoding to study what animals eat. This means we handle a lot of poop, which is the raw material from which we can extract DNA and reconstruct diets. Primarily, we focus on ungulate herbivores (from zebra to deer to cattle) and the intricacies of their plant diets. A core question across this research is: what are the aspects of plant chemistry that herbivores use to select foods and how do those indicators relate to individual nutritional condition? Ultimately, our aim is to develop and validate predictive models of herbivore foraging behavior that can guide population management.
At higher trophic levels, we ask how predators weigh availability, reward, and risk during prey selection. Based in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, we are studying how predator diets adapt to novel environments and are influenced by sociality and group culture.
Linking foraging behavior with individual- and population-level consequences relies on our ability to accurately measure an individual’s body mass and condition. For large animals, like ungulates, this has often required invasive or destructive sampling methods.
In collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we are developing a platform for automated measurement of body mass and size in large animals. This platform will allow scientists and ecosystem managers to track body condition non-invasively across populations in real time and also provide data on population age structure and overall health.
Large herbivores must navigate dramatic changes in quality and availability of plant foods as seasons shift from summer to winter or wet to dry. Using fine-scale temporal sampling of diet composition across entire communities of herbivores, we are investigating how dietary-niche overlap among species changes with the seasons. Alongside collaborators at Wake Forest University and in The Netherlands, we also study how the seasonal wildebeest migration in the Serengeti alters niche overlap among non-migratory species and based on the water dependence of those species.
Mouth morphology shapes how herbivores feed and which plants can most profitably be selected. Studying the unchecked growth of Gorongosa’s waterbuck population, we are testing whether intraspecific variation in mouth architecture leads to divergence in diet composition and foraging habits within the population.