We are trapping woodrats in the area around Anza (on BLM lands) and would only like permission to use the station as a home base. Ideally, we would house our animals captured elsewhere during the heat of the day in one of your rooms (lab or classroom). Information on our project follows below but again all this work will be on neighboring BLM lands. Project Description: Determining the mechanisms mediating the diet choices of mammalian herbivores is critical to understanding the interactions between plants and herbivores. The processing of food is a complex endeavor for the consumer particularly when toxins are involved. Populations of desert woodrats (Neotoma lepida) have undergone radical dietary changes due to shifts in the flora during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene (18,700-10,000 years ago). This event resulted in both of these woodrat species independently switching from ancestral diets of juniper and/or cactus (resp.), to one containing large quantities of creosote bush. As the climate warmed, creosote replaced juniper at low elevations, and expanded to become the dominant shrub in the major deserts of the U.S. southwest. In these areas, woodrats have little dietary choice other than creosote, and thus, creosote comprises ~75% of the woodrat diet. In addition to the woodrats that now specialize on creosote, other populations of woodrats have never fed on creosote, and are thus evolutionarily and ecologically naive to creosotes unique suite of highly toxic plant secondary compounds. By trapping individuals from populations with diverse evolutionary associations with creosote and known patterns of speciation or hybridization we hope to better understand the genomic basis of repeated adaptation of herbivores to toxic diets. We wish to sample 10 individuals from two species and their hybrids in Morongo Valleyto quantify their creosote tolerance and to look for associated differences in their genomes. This requires the removal of these animals and subsequent transportation to our animal facility at the University of Utah where they will be maintained and their tolerance carefully quantified (see attached papers or our website for examples). Additionally, we will be supplementing this effort with museum specimens that will allow us to increase our sample size without trapping .

Approved