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Ben Dantzer, a UBC 3MT Finalist, shares their Youth- Initiated Mentoring model with the goal of helping close the mentorship gap in Canada. This mentoring model presents a process for empowering Canadian youth to identify and connect with adults they already know in their community, and to work with them to invite these individuals to more formally mentor them. Ben Dantzer is completing their PhD in Human Development, Learning, and Culture under the supervision of Dr. Nancy Perry.

Applying physiological tools, knowledge and concepts to understand conservation problems (i.e. conservation physiology) has become commonplace and confers an ability to understand mechanistic processes, develop predictive models and identify cause-and-effect relationships. Conservation physiology is making contributions to conservation solutions; the number of ‘success stories’ is growing, but there remain unexplored opportunities for which conservation physiology shows immense promise and has the potential to contribute to major advances in protecting and restoring biodiversity. Here, we consider how conservation physiology has evolved with a focus on reframing the discipline to be more inclusive and integrative. Using a ‘horizon scan’, we further explore ways in which conservation physiology can be more relevant to pressing conservation issues of today (e.g. addressing the Sustainable Development Goals; delivering science to support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration), as well as more forward-looking to inform emerging issues and policies for tomorrow. Our horizon scan provides evidence that, as the discipline of conservation physiology continues to mature, it provides a wealth of opportunities to promote integration, inclusivity and forward-thinking goals that contribute to achieving conservation gains. To advance environmental management and ecosystem restoration, we need to ensure that the underlying science (such as that generated by conservation physiology) is relevant with accompanying messaging that is straightforward and accessible to end users.

The pace of life syndrome hypothesis posits that personality traits (i.e., consistent individual differences in behaviour) are linked to life history and fitness. Specifically, fast-paced individuals are predicted to be proactive (i.e., active and aggressive) with an earlier age at first reproduction, a shorter lifespan, and a higher fecundity than slow-paced individuals. Environmental conditions and sex differences may be important in maintaining behavioural and life history variation in populations and may influence the covariance of personality with life history or lifetime fitness. However, these effects are rarely tested together. We investigated whether the occurrence of a resource pulse (called a mast year) during adulthood altered the associations between personality and life history traits or lifetime offspring production in adult North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus). Despite accounting for environmental context during adulthood, we found no evidence of an overall pace-of-life syndrome in this population as personality was not associated with age at first reproduction or longevity in either sex. Males and females had similar activity levels, but females were more aggressive, potentially due to the fitness benefits of protecting their offspring from predation. In all females regardless of mast experience, there was no association between activity and lifetime pup production but there was a positive association between aggression and lifetime pup production. In males that experienced a mast there was a positive association between lifetime pup production and both activity and aggression. In males that did not experience a mast, there was no association between activity and lifetime pup production but a negative association between aggression and lifetime pup production. Lifetime recruit production in either sex was not influenced by activity or aggression regardless of mast experience. Overall, our results suggest that the infrequent occurrence of mast years may contribute to maintaining variation in personality traits in red squirrels.

Museum genomics is one of the most influential fields in modern collections-based research. Recently, these methods have been extended to study epigenetic markers in ancient DNA. Previous work has focused on well-preserved ancient tissues; here, we develop and test epigenomic methods for traditionally preserved natural history specimens (dried skulls) up to 76 years old. We used a combination of ddRAD and bisulfite treatment to characterize genome-wide patterns of cytosine methylation in two species of deer mice (Peromyscus spp.). We were able to describe methylation in specimens from all age groups, and global methylation did not vary due to specimen age. Locus methylation was bimodally distributed and was reduced in promoter regions and heightened in gene bodies, consistent with expectations for in vivo methylation in mammals. Global methylation estimates for the two species were within the expected range for mammals but at the lower end, suggesting that estimates may have been depressed due to the choice of reference genome. The quantity of data varied more across older specimens. For example, although most specimens in the oldest group (76 yo) yielded few cytosines, two specimens performed as well as modern specimens sequenced in the same library. Our work demonstrates the utility of historic specimens for methylation analyses, as with genomic analyses; however, such studies will need to accommodate the large variance among individuals in the quantity of data produced by historic samples, either by screening specimens for DNA quantity and quality prior to library construction or by expanding sampling to allow for a higher failure rate. We suggest that analyses requiring fewer specimens overall, such as differential methylation analyses, may be the most successful. Museum epigenomics datasets can be used to describe methylation in historic populations or shifts in methylation over time; here we present comparative data tracking methylation patterns in deer mice collected over the past 76 years over the course of an ecological range expansion.

The causes and consequences of individual differences in animal behavior and stress physiology are increasingly studied in wild animals, yet the possibility that stress physiology underlies individual variation in social behavior has received less attention. In this review, we bring together these study areas and focus on understanding how the activity of the vertebrate neuroendocrine stress axis (HPA-axis) may underlie individual differences in social behavior in wild animals. We first describe a continuum of vertebrate social behaviors spanning from initial social tendencies (proactive behavior) to social behavior occurring in reproductive contexts (parental care, sexual pair-bonding) and lastly to social behavior occurring in nonreproductive contexts (nonsexual bonding, group-level cooperation). We then perform a qualitative review of existing literature to address the correlative and causal association between measures of HPA-axis activity (glucocorticoid levels or GCs) and each of these types of social behavior. As expected, elevated HPA-axis activity can inhibit social behavior associated with initial social tendencies (approaching conspecifics) and reproduction. However, elevated HPA-axis activity may also enhance more elaborate social behavior outside of reproductive contexts, such as alloparental care behavior. In addition, the effect of GCs on social behavior can depend upon the sociality of the stressor (cause of increase in GCs) and the severity of stress (extent of increase in GCs). Our review shows that the while the associations between stress responses and sociality are diverse, the role of HPA-axis activity behind social behavior may shift toward more facilitating and less inhibiting in more social species, providing insight into how stress physiology and social systems may co-evolve.

Expected and observed frequency of male offspring per litter in 1728 North American red squirrel litters of (A) two, (B) three, (C) four, and (D) five juveniles observed over 20 years. Sample size (n) in each panel indicates the number of litters.