image: A URI graduate student is using National Science Foundation funding to study the social dynamics of degus, a small rodent native to Chile.
Credit: URI Quest Lab
In most social animals, cooperation starts with kinship. But in the world of degus, family trees don’t explain who lives together or why they share the work of raising young. For Emilio Pedroza Lopez, a master’s student in natural resources science at the University of Rhode Island, studying the social dynamics of degus — a small rodent native to Chile — offers clues to one of biology’s enduring questions: why animals choose to live together.
His research has now been recognized through the highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), which provides $159,000 over three years to support his ongoing work on social behavior in wild rodent populations.
At URI, Pedroza Lopez works in the Quest Lab with Professor Kathleen Carroll.
A unique social system
Emilio Pedroza Lopez, a master’s student in natural resources science, will examine wild animal social dynamics with a highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Pedroza Lopez’s research examines how the social dynamics of the common degu population in Chile shape the way these animals use space. His master’s thesis explores how variation in social group formation influences home range size, or the area a group uses in its daily activities.
“This matters because movement is closely tied to the resources degus can access,” he said, “which ultimately affects group success, especially in harsh environments like the desert shrubland we study.”
His work considers several factors that may influence how far groups range, including group size, sex composition, stability, and other behavioral traits. He added, “We want to understand how these social factors shape how degus use space around their burrows, and what that reveals about the costs and benefits of group living.”
Degus also provide a rare opportunity to study cooperation beyond genetic ties. “Unlike many social animals, degus don’t form groups based on genetic relatedness,” Pedroza Lopez said. “That lets us examine other drivers of group living and communal breeding, where multiple females reproduce and jointly care for pups regardless of parentage.”
His research ultimately asks how these social systems influence survival and success. “My work looks at how social factors affect individual success through space use,” he said. “It helps explain why degus live in groups and share care even without genetic ties, rather than living alone.”
Fieldwork in action
Pedroza Lopez’s research involves months of intensive fieldwork, monitoring a single population of degus over the course of a field season using live trapping, GPS tracking, and behavioral observation.
“The most exciting part of my fieldwork has been working with a single population over a relatively long period of time (5–6 months), trapping and monitoring them 5–6 days a week,” he said. “Because of this, we learn to recognize individuals and the personality traits that set them apart, and we can follow their progress throughout the field season.”
He also highlighted the opportunity to observe young animals as they first emerge from the burrows they are born in. “We also get to be around for the offspring-rearing season, when pups start coming out of their burrows and we can collect data for future projects looking at how the variables we study may impact reproductive success,” he said.
As his research continues, Pedroza Lopez hopes his findings will contribute to a broader understanding of social behavior across species. “Mechanisms that drive social behavior are likely to apply to other social species, giving us a better idea of why these behaviors exist across social animals,” he said.
This story was written by Anna Gray in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences.