Adiposity signals predict vocal effort in Alston's singing mice

Link to article: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2018.0090

This was a research project that I assisted on during my undergraduate tenure at UT Austin. The talented Dr. Tracy Burkhard was my graduate student mentor at the time. We used Alston's singing mouse (Scotinomys teguina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alston%27s_brown_mouse) as a model system to investigate how physiological markers of condition relate to costly sexually-selected traits. For the mice, this meant male investment in courtship songs. Song effort was strongly correlated with measures of adiposity, a measure of an animal's long-term nutritional state.

Read more about our work in this post on the Proceedings of the Royal Society B's blog: https://royalsociety.org/blog/2018/04/alstons-singing-mice/