Dr. Ted Stankowich

Other times they just stared at it like it was not there at all.

And so we were looking at how the coloration affected it.

And essentially what we found was that, not surprisingly, the mountain lion evoked the strongest response in terms of snorting, stamping, never running away, because those cats need to be about six to 10 meters away before they can really have a chance of capturing a deer.

So they just were saying, I'm here, I see you here, don't come around, there's something over there.

So apparently the vertical stripes did not camouflage the big cat shape in that coastal California environment.

So they treated the tiger just the same as they did a mountain lion.

And the deer, they didn't respond to at all.

In fact, I had some males try to approach me with a very interested look on their face.

It was a female deer at during model.

Had to abort those trials pretty quickly.

I was at the field station.

I was a weird guy laying on the ground with big cat models that everyone else was driving to the marine lab.

They curl up into a ball, yeah.

Only one species can actually make it all the way into a ball.

Really?

Yeah, the three-banded armadillo is the only one that actually form a tight ball.

The rest of them can maybe curl a little bit, but most of them just sort of hunker down and try to keep their shell over top of them.

But yeah, I think as you progress in your career, you expand your horizons.

So as a PhD student, I was all about deer and escape behavior and anti-predator recognition.

And then I started to get more into evolutionary work with bold coloration.