ABS 2023
Search
The Thing That Stuck: Morphometric Variation in Raccoons Across Urbanization Gradients
Christina M. Sluka1, Sarah Benson-Amram2, Merav Ben-David1. 1University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, United States; 2University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

As a legacy of an Animal Behavior (ABEH) undergraduate program, it is clear to me how an ABEH degree can shape one’s interests and career. Like how one tiny anecdote by one invited class speaker in one undergrad course can stick and spark an interest in wildlife cognition. Here I explore the thing that stuck: why are raccoons such prolific urbanites? With nearly all urban growth in the United States occurring only in the last 200 years, we are witness to an entirely novel and highly dynamic habitat type. The speed of this growth juxtaposed against vast rural areas across the nation makes urbanization in the U.S. an opportunity to investigate adaptive change in wildlife across multiple diverse ecoregions. By studying raccoons in an urban context, we can understand not only raccoon evolution, ecology, and cognition, but also the dynamics of cities as habitats and hotbeds for human mediated speciation. We redefine the urban habitat from the perspective of raccoon behavioral ecology through the assessment of movement behaviors and apply these metrics to the variation in raccoon cranial and mandibular morphology.