Achievement

During the 2011-2012 academic year, IGERT Trainee Andrew Gersick completed major fieldwork for experiments on vocal communication among spotted hyenas in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya. Spotted hyenas are social carnivores that live in large, hierarchical fission-fusion groups, which means that they must not only modulate their behavior in accordance with their place in a complex dominance hierarchy, but must keep track of their relationships with clan-mates across considerable time and distance. Gersick’s experiments are designed to determine whether hyenas use different versions of their long-distance "whoop" vocalizations - wailing calls that can be heard many kilometers away - for different functions, both to announce their presence in the territory and to raise an alarm during high-stakes conflicts. Gersick is currently reviewing video data from his experiments and working on his dissertation.