Hannah Griebling

And actually, as a different part of my dissertation research, I did surveys of humans to see how people in Vancouver feel about raccoons.

And one of the top feelings that people have is that they are adorable or cuteness.

And so I think that helps with just our tolerance of them.

And then that feeds back into that behavior of them being less afraid of humans and then potentially feeds back into some of those nuisance behaviors as well.

I'm ready.

Oh, probably my favorite one is that they can climb down a tree facing forward.

So they're one of the few animals of their size that can actually climb downwards headfirst.

Yeah, they don't mate for life.

So we don't know a ton about their reproduction and their mate choice and things like that.

But what we do know is that they do potentially have a raccoon friend.

So we're still sort of studying their social environment.

But there was one study conducted that showed, so they will share dens with another raccoon.

And that raccoon, males will share with females, females will share with other females, and males will share with other males.

And they are not necessarily related.

So we often think of something called kin selection, where it's adaptive to, you know, protect members that also have your same genes so that those genes have a better chance of getting

passed on.

So it's really surprising that they're not sharing a den or necessarily associating with other raccoons that they're most closely related to.

They're called a gaze.

Yeah, they have a really specific gait and they have this really arched back, which makes them very distinctive.

So I think a scuttle is a good word or a scamper.