Loren Hayes
University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, TN·Ecology & Evolution
Animals that live in groups adjust how those groups are organized when their environment changes — who shares a burrow, how many individuals are in a group, who mates with whom. Whether those adjustments help or hurt reproduction is a key question for predicting how social species will fare as climate shifts.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
behavioral ecology
social organization
social structure
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Determine how environmentally mediated changes in social organization — group size and composition — influence reproductive success in the degu (Octodon degus), a social rodent endemic to Chile.
- Test how social structure, the pattern of interactions among group members, relates to reproductive outcomes across degu populations spanning different environmental conditions in Chile.
- Collect behavioral and spatial data on free-living degus using live-trapping, radio telemetry, activity data-loggers, GPS and spatial mapping at multiple Chilean field sites.
- Build mathematical models from the field and geospatial data that predict how environmental change affects animal societies, and use model predictions to design follow-up field studies.
- Estimate the influence of environmental conditions on degu mating strategies and reproductive success through laboratory-based analyses complementing the field work.
More about the research
This international research program tackles that question in the degu (Octodon degus), a social rodent found only in Chile and distributed across a wide range of environments, making it a natural system for comparing populations living under different conditions.
Why it matters
Understanding how shifting climatic conditions reshape animal social systems, and what that does to reproduction, is needed to predict which social species can persist as environments change. The program also builds a research workforce with an unusual combination of field behavioral, geospatial and mathematical modeling skills, and extends STEM training to high school students in the Chattanooga region.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jacinta Beehner
University of Michigan, MI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether female non-human primates use aggression and dominance to monopolize males and gain social benefits such as protection and infant care, using long-term behavioral and demographic databases.
Olaf Jensen
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether fish in Lake Hovsgol and the Eg River use behavioral thermoregulation, moving to cooler microhabitats, to cope with warming, using electronic tags and temperature-logging sensors.
Clinton Francis
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether noise and light pollution consistently favor a similar set of traits across six songbird species that differ in life history and tolerance of humans.
The school
University of Tennessee-Chattanooga: 2 labs on PI Pages, $12M a year on research, 14 research doctorates a year.
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