Graduated May 2023

Author: Rylee Gibson | Major: Biology and Spanish | Semester: Spring 2023

My name is Rylee Gibson and I am a biology and Spanish Language major in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Over the Spring 2023 semester, I conducted and presented research to explore a potential bias in detection method of mesopredators, which are small carnivorous predators such as raccoon, opossum, skunk, cat, dog, or larger animals like coyote or bobcat. I found my mentor, Dr. Brett DeGregorio, while exploring professors engaging in research at the university. I knew that I wanted to be involved in ecological research- so when I read about Dr. Brett DeGregorio’s research, I was captivated, and I reached out. Later, I chose my research topic with the keen observations of my mentor; he observed many instances striped skunk roadkill, but rarely saw proportional numbers of striped skunk represented in papers exploring mesopredator community composition. Therefore, he brought this to me as an idea, and thought we could do a study that focused on quantifying the skunk community within the mesopredator community using game cameras in Fayetteville, Arkansas; we hypothesized that smaller animals with thicker fur (like the striped skunk) could be evading the infrared capturing of the game cameras due to keeping most of their body heat inside, and therefore could be underrepresented in those types of studies. However, after about a month of trial and error, we captured no photos of skunks- only of their mesopredator peers. Due to this, we pivoted our study to mesopredators as a whole. We did this through two experiments; the first was a game-camera deployment in areas of Fayetteville, in which we deployed a game camera and a time lapse camera to assess a potential bias in mesopredator capturing. For the second experiment, I went through North American game camera literature to assess a difference in mesopredator presence based on a number of factors including method of detection (baited camera, nonbaited camera, or noncamera methods), location, season, time of day, habitat, and number of animals detected.

Through this research experience, I have learned many invaluable things about myself as a researcher. When I began, I had never partaken in a research project of this magnitude and felt quite daunted and nervous to think about what was waiting for me. However- as one thing I learned within the past two years- I realized that my project was progressing as much as it should over time. I had all the help I needed from my mentor (and the graduate students in the Coop lab), so even if I was lost or didn’t know what the next steps were, all I had to do was ask. As time went on, so did my project progress, and before I knew it, I was printing out the final document in Mullins Library. I also inherently learned much about my research topic; opossum and coyote were the only mesopredators affected by the study design of mesopredator composition studies, and raccoon and opossum were the small mesopredators that I could almost always count on being present in both the literature I reviewed and my own game camera experiment. Perhaps the most pertinent skill I acquired through this experiment was the ability to efficiently read peer-reviewed scientific literature. Having had to go through hundreds of papers for this project, I quickly developed the capacity to absorb the necessary information, and how to find related papers based on exactly what I needed.

This summer I am excited to be helping Dr. Magoulick and Leah Bayer in their research involving crayfish communities. I look forward to participating in more captivating research that also allows me to enjoy the surrounding beauty that Arkansas and Missouri has to offer. I plan on attending graduate school in the coming years after I gain more insight as to what interests me and what I’d like to study. For now, I am more than happy to enjoy the outdoors in the name of research.