Wolves, coyotes, dogs and hyenas howl and whoop to communicate across vast distances.
Taking a cue from the mammals she is studying, a Michigan State University scientist is calling out on the Internet to seek funds to help move her field forward.
For more than a year, Kenna Lehmann, MSU zoology graduate student, has been working with the Cooperative Predator Vocalization Consortium, a group studying the evolution of communication, cooperation and cognition in social carnivores. Her colleagues have been meeting via Skype, but they realized to better tackle this topic and connect with fellow researchers, they needed to meet in-person at the forthcoming Behaviour 2015 conference in Australia.
“This crowd-funding effort is supporting the advancement of the field of cooperation, communication and cognitive science,” Lehmann said. “Helping bring three scientists to this conference, who would otherwise be unable to participate, ensures that their work, knowledge and experience are incorporated into the projects and collaborations that help advance our field.”
Lehmann, who works with Kay Holekamp, MSU hyena expert, is hoping to educate fellow researchers on the social structure and the vocal and cooperative behavior of spotted hyenas. Their social structure is quite complex and unique among social carnivores, Lehmann said.
“Spotted hyenas are such a strange mammalian outlier, so it is important to incorporate what we know about them into the scientific framework that our consortium plans to build at this conference,” she said. “I also hope to gain insight from my fellow researchers working on communication and behavior in other species. Their years of experience will be invaluable to my work.”
Arik Kershenbaum, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge (U.K), spearheaded the consortium’s crowd-sourcing initiative. The group is hoping to raise enough money to send Lehmann, Jessica Owens, an assistant professor at Union College, and Bilal Habib, a researcher at the Wildlife Institute of India, to the Australian gathering.
With traditional methods exhausted, the scientists turned to crowd funding as a viable option. So far, they have raised nearly $1,000 of their $7,000 goal.
“The funding I have obtained through grants and other support has gone into my research,” Lehmann said. “My career is still developing, and it is important to me to become not just a good scientist, but a great one. This means I need to gain as much access as possible to other great scientists to learn from them.”