Dr. Ted Stankowich

We did a lot of work with Tim Caro, who is a well-known mammalian coloration biologist.

We've published a bunch of papers now together.

And then I got interested in skunks.

And the great thing was no one works on skunks.

It's very uncommon to have anyone work on skunks.

And those who do usually are just doing coloring and tracking their movements.

They aren't doing behavior.

I'm a behaviorist at heart.

And so I really honed in on the idea of looking at predator-prey relationships with a defended animal that advertises its defense, the black and white stripes, and their common predator, a coyote.

So a lot of what we do is looking at how do skunks perceive fear?

How do they respond to predators?

And how do predators learn about those types of prey?

It's a great question.

And a lot of work has been done on that very question.

And it varies depending on the type of animal you're talking about.

We did a project where we trained coyotes to not attack skunks using skunk models.

This was a captive colony in Utah.

We sort of conditioned them to eat off of brown furry plates, take their normal food off of a brown furry plate.

Then we gave them a skunk model.

with their food on it.