Cheetah Dictionary
Posted at 10:28 am July 18, 2006 by Sagan FriantCRES offers summer student fellowships to help undergraduates, recent graduates, and graduate students gain research experience. The Fellows enjoy doing research outside of the university without having to juggle class work on the side!
My name is Sagan and I have recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where I studied anthropology and conservation biology. I grew up in San Diego, where the Zoo and Wild Animal Park motivated me to pursue an education that would one day lead to a career that would allow me to study and work with animals. Now I am back on the home front working with the people I have admired since I was little.
The Behavioral Biology Division of CRES is working on a very large project that is investigating the way in which an animal senses influence reproductive behavior. Part of this project examines how acoustic signals (animal vocalizations) may have an effect on reproduction. With the help of Dr. Matthew Anderson, I am doing research on cheetah vocalizations. My job is to visit the cheetah breeding facility (an off-exhibit area at the Wild Animal Park) in the mornings and late afternoons to record cheetah vocalizations. In the mornings I follow the keepers around while they feed the cheetahs: the cats have a lot to say when they are hungry! In the afternoons, I look at the vocalizations I recorded using a computer program for sound analysis.
Right now I am focused on obtaining a large sample and wide variety of cheetah vocalizations. We hope to achieve a greater understanding of what each vocalization means and to better comprehend their full vocal repertoire. In other words, we want to create a dictionary of all the sounds they make and what they mean. By understanding what they are communicating to each other we hope to see how and if it influences their reproductive behavior. More knowledge of factors influencing reproductive behavior is very important in order to improve managed-care breeding programs for cheetahs and other animals.
I will be at CRES and working on these projects throughout the summer. Check back for updates to see how my project is going!
Sagan Friant is a Summer Fellow with the Behavioral Biology Division of CRES.
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July 18th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
that sounds like a really cool study. i look forward to hearing what you find. i hope everything else is going fine (and that you aren't dying of the heat!). talk to you later