SQUIRREL SCHOOL

Juvenile animals must learn and survive at the same time –– how to find food, make friends, escape predators. In short, they face the same problems as adults with fewer resources. A juvenile squirrel, born in the spring, faces daunting odds –– close to three quarters of the juveniles will die from starvation, predation or accident in that first summer. Partnering with Bay Area wildlife rescue organization WildCare, we study captive juveniles to understand these learning processes, with the goal of using these data to determine if individual differences in captivity predict long-term success after they are re-released. 

The work is funded by a MURI grant from the Army Research Office for the consortium “The Science of Embodied Cognition”. Helmed by roboticist Dan Koditschek (Penn), the group comprises teams led by material scientist Shu Yang (Penn), biomechanicist Bob Full (The Polypedal Lab, Berkeley), neuroethologist/engineer Noah Cowan (Johns Hopkins), behavioral neuroscientist Jim Knierim (Johns Hopkins) and mathematician Yuliy Baryshnikov (Univ Illinois Urbana).