Innovation Anthology #125: Director, Ingenuity Lab and Professor, Dept of Chemical and Materials Engineering
Those chatty little Kluane red squirrels have hit the news again. And this time, it’s about the newly discovered “silver spoon” effect.
That’s the latest finding of University of Alberta ecologist Dr. Stan Boutin and his international team of squirrel researchers from Michigan and France.
The scientists reviewed 15 years worth of data they’ve collected on generations of red squirrels living in the Yukon at Kluane.
As published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, when the researchers controlled for conditions the squirrels experienced as adults, a startling picture emerged.
The scientists discovered that baby squirrels born into fortunate circumstances with abundant food, milder springs and a lower population grew up to experience longer lives and much greater reproductive success.
In essence, these squirrels were born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths.
On the other hand, red squirrels born into poor conditions where there was less food and more extreme spring weather had shorter lifespans and weaned fewer offspring.
Dr. Boutin’s findings provide important insight into impact climate change it may have on the survival of squirrels and other small mammals.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
Carlo Montemagno, PhD,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,
Sponsor
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
The Integrated Landscape Management Chair is developing a toolkit for ecologically informed land use planning. At the heart of this toolkit is a suite of models capable of integrating multiple land use activities over large areas and long time scales to explore the future impacts of todays land use decisions. The models do this by linking human actions to indicators of ecological, economic, and social condition. They are constrained by their ability to adequately represent the dynamics of complex systems, and our current research emphasis aims to reduce the uncertainties over the impacts of invasive organisms on species at risk in Canadas boreal forest.
The ILM Chair is an initiative of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, with sponsors and collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector.
Program Date: 2008-04-15