Mice monitors

These days Mabry conducts her research at the Quail Ridge Natural Reserve, a 2,000-acre wilderness maintained by the University of California at Davis and one of the few places in the world equipped with a solar-powered, automated animal-tracking system.

Brush mice, common throughout the West, are live-trapped, ear-tagged and fitted with tiny radio collars weighing half a gram to allow Mabry, an assistant professor of biology at New Mexico State University, to monitor how generations of the rodents disperse from their birth places to new grounds as adults.

Karen Mabry, an assistant professor of biology at New Mexico State University, displays a tiny radio collar she and members of her research team place around the necks of brush mice to monitor their movements. (RENE ROMO/JOURNAL)

Mabry is conducting basic research involving mice behavior in an undisturbed environment, in this case an oak woodland-covered peninsula jutting into a reservoir, to inform later studies involving mice in an environment disturbed by human activities.

When she isn’t teaching classes at NMSU, she’s conducting field research at the California site.

“It’s amazing how little we know about it,” Mabry said. “Because the animals are small . . . and they are hard to keep up with, it’s kind of a black box right now.”

Last year, Mabry received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award, which provided $910,000 to fund her research over the next five years.

“As we humans influence natural landscapes, and break them up into smaller and smaller pieces, and put roads through forests . . . these movement processes are becoming more and more important for keeping these animal and plant populations around,” Mabry said.

The automated tracking system at Quail Ridge will enable Mabry and her team of student researchers to spend more time trapping and collaring mice in order to generate more data. The number of collared mice available for study is important because the little research subjects can fall prey to foxes or other predators, wriggle out of their collars or die before reaching adulthood.

The brush mice, Mabry said, tend to live three to six months in the wild because “they are a food source for almost everything else.”

The National Science Foundation grant supports a course that will allow undergraduates to learn field techniques and conduct their own research projects. Mabry also has partnered with the Asombro Institute for Science Education to work with elementary school students from fourth to sixth grade. So far, Mabry said, the school children from Las Cruces are only using equipment to located stuffed animals, not live ones.