PhD student, Nathan Ranc (Moorcroft Lab) studies wildlife movement ecology. Nathan's work - supported by the Edmund Mach Foundation in Italy - follows the staggering expansion of the golden jackal. Ranc and Miha Krofel, a conservation biologist at the University of Ljubljana, lead 37 volunteers — scientists and naturalists — in monitoring the golden jackal throughout Europe. Ranc and Krofel's research was recently covered by the ...

L. Mahadevan and PhD students, Jacob Peters ('18) and Mary Salcedo (Mahadevan Lab) teamed with Prof. Orit Peleg, Colorado University-Boulder, to research the collective mechanical adaptation in honeybee swarms. The study, published in Nature Physics, shows the swarm of bees act as a superorganism that responds to physical stress by changing shape. Using both physical experiments and computer modeling, the team showed that the inverted cone...

As a graduate student in Naomi Pierce's lab, Leonora Bittleston (PhD '17) traveled to Nepenthes Camp in the Maliau Basin, an elevated conservation area in Malaysian Borneo with a rich, isolated rainforest ecosystem, to collect pitcher plants. The carnivorous pitcher plants trap, drown and digest their animal prey to supplement nutrient-poor soils. Bittleston collected samples of the liquid inside the pitchers to compare to pitcher plants in Massachusetts and along the Gulf Coast. Though unrelated, both plant families had similar adaptations for trapping prey and are a perfect...

During a fieldtrip to Panama last summer, PhD student Danny Haelewaters (Pfister Lab) worked with a team of six researchers -- including PhD student Jasmin Camacho (Hoekstra Lab) -- to capture bats using mistnets for seven subsequent nights in a cloud-forested reserve in Darien, Panama. The team captured 227 bats representing 17 species to study the bat's parasitic associations. Their findings, published in...