Dr. Ted Stankowich

The other things that live in that area are other carnivores that can defend themselves with claws and teeth.

as well as rabbits and things that hop.

So high-speed escape, hopping is a very fast form of escape.

And so if you're living in this danger zone, as we called it, then having a high-speed escape is also a way out as well.

Sure.

I basically scared deer for six years.

It was really a great experience.

So part of my PhD was walking towards or running towards deer to look at their escape behavior with speed, directness of approach, if I was holding a fake rifle or not, and looking at how they chose when to flee and how they chose where to flee.

So escape decisions were a big part of it.

I was studying black-tailed deer up on the northern coast of California.

And their only current large cat predator is a mountain lion.

But historically, 600,000 years ago, they would have seen spotted cats, spotted jaguars.

And now jaguars only come as far north as Arizona and New Mexico.

So we exposed them to pop-up two-dimensional life-size models of a mountain lion, a spotted cat, a tiger, and a cat.

and another mule deer as a control.

Essentially, I would have a student drive a car, and I would hide behind the car.

We would drive past a group of deer, and I'd duck behind the bush.

The student would go drive away and put a camera up to start to film.

Then I'd pop the model up over the bush from about 20 meters away, and we'd record their responses.

And sometimes they got really, really scared.