Passion for wildlife conservation involves undergraduate research

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research 1:07 Passion for wildlife conservation involves undergraduate research

By:

Clark Dehart

16 Feb 2024 247

Truman Collins is a transfer student in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. His interest in the margay, a small feline species in Belize, lead him to pursue undergraduate research. With the help of an undergraduate research fellowship, Collins can help conserve habitat for these cryptic cats.

Margays are a species of wildcat. They're about the size of a house cat. They live down in Belize and they're primarily arboreal, so hanging out in the trees, upper canopy areas. I was actually an engineering student and I came into Tech with a lot of carried over credit from Virginia Western. I went down with the Belize Jaguar Project my freshman year. Over that winter break. It was amazing, I fell in love with wildlife, and then switched my major when I got back. So the College of Natural Resources Fellowship, it allowed me to focus on something that I'm passionate about. We have a lot of data on jaguars, pumas, ocelots, the other cats in Belize. But margays, there's just a lack of information. Wanting to work on such an understudied species was really appealing. Understanding the preferred habitat of the margays will better allow us to target specific habitat chunks to help preserve their future populations.