2024
Kaitlyn Gaynor
Ecologist studies animals’ response to human impacts on their environments
2024
Ecologist studies animals’ response to human impacts on their environments
Large mammals are always making decisions, such as where to go, what to eat, how to stay safe. Increasingly, those decisions relate to human impacts on their environment. The behavioral response of animals to our presence is the focus of Ecologist Kaitlyn Gaynor’s research — the work that garnered the University of British Columbia Assistant Professor a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship.
“I study large, terrestrial mammals, like bears and elephants and lions, and the work we do in our lab involves applying fundamental concepts from behavioral ecology and community ecology to help us understand how they respond to novel changes in their environment caused by human activity,” she explains. “Animals are constantly making decisions about what to do at a given time and place, and we humans are changing the opportunities available to them, the perceived risks that they’re experiencing. Therefore, we’re changing the decisions that they’re making — and sometimes those decisions have negative consequences for the animals. They can keep them away from good habitat. They might get them killed.”
“But sometimes these changes allow animals flexibility in their behaviour, allow them to make a living in a world that looks really different from the world in which they originally evolved, and perhaps to coexist better with people.”
Ultimately, the motivation of Dr. Gaynor’s research is to better inform the management and conservation of large mammals that need a lot of space — space that humans are increasingly taking away from them.
Her lab is currently exploring what happens when humans take predators out of environments and then put them back in. What does that mean for the behaviour of the other species interacting with those predators? It’s part of her continuing work in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.
Dr. Gaynor calls the Sloan Fellowship a “tremendous honour,” noting that, in her case, it reflects “a broader recognition of the importance of doing work that straddles fundamental science and applied science.” She says she is grateful to the “incredible colleagues and peers and mentors” who have supported her work and the “graduate students, undergraduates and postdocs in my lab who are now really leading a lot of the work.”
