Scott Creel 302 Lewis Hall Conservation Biology & Ecology Program Department of Ecology Montana State University Bozeman MT 59717 Email: screel@montana.edu Phone: 406-994-7033

Current Research: 

General Areas of Interest:  Behavioral ecology, population biology, conservation, behavioral endocrinology, evolutionary ecology.  Virtually all of my research is based on field studies, generally using observational methods, and often following known individuals.  Much of the work in my lab has involved the integration of behavioral and demographic data from the field with physiological and genetic data from the lab.  My lab is equipped for extraction and enzyme immunoassays of steroid and peptide hormones, microhistology and other assays.  

My current research mainly examines risk effects, or the costs of antipredator responses by prey species.  Recent research with many species has shown that direct killing constitutes only a fraction of the total limiting effect of predators on their prey.  We have recently examined the responses of elk to variation in the risk of predation by wolves, including changes in behavior, group size, habitat selection, feeding ecology, and spatial distributions.  We related these responses to changes in nutrition, physiology, demography and population dynamics. This work won the 2010 Carl Gustav Bernhard Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. We are now analyzing data from parallel research in the South Rift Valley of Kenya, examining interactions between lions, spotted hyenas and their prey, effects on small and medium-sized carnivores, and interactions with people and cattle inside and outside of a Community Conservation Area.  This research is testing the generality of conclusions from the wolf-elk project, while simultaneously examining the management and conservation of carnivores and their prey outside of centrally-protected areas in East Africa. Our primary field research is now with the Zambian Carnivore Programme, headed by Dr. Matt Becker, to examine risk effects and carnivore conservation in three national parks, with several species of predators and prey.  This work aims to measure variation in direct predation rates and risk effects, to identify the ecological factors drive this variation, and provide data for the conservation and management of large predator-prey interactions. Another current project, with Dr. Paul Cross of the USGS Northern Rockies Research Center, is focused on the ways that environmental conditions, predation risk and human land use affect elk distributions, aggregation patterns and contact rates, and how these affect the epidemiology of brucellosis. My students and I address these questions with a variety of methods, including behavioral observations, demographic & ecological monitoring, ground and aerial censuses, camera trapping, GPS and VHF radiotelemetry, enzyme immunoassay of fecal steroid metabolites to measure pregnancy rates and glucocorticoid stress responses, measurements of abiotic factors such as weather and snow conditions, and assessments of diet quality by chemical, radioisotope and microhistological methods.

  Teaching:   

• Conservation Biology, BIOE 440 (formerly BIOL 447) & BIOL 521, Fall semester
  
• General Ecology, BIOE 370 (formerly BIOL 303), Spring semester. 
  
• President's Excellence in Teaching Award, 2008
  

 

Graduate Students:
 
Current graduate students    Former graduate students    I encourage my graduate students to participate fully in developing their own research questions and to pursue independent funding.  Here are some brief notes on the process of writing a paper, and here are some ideas about preparing for the qualifying exam.

Older Research:


From 1984-1986, I studied behavioral and physiological mechanisms that mediate the effects of early experience on milk production in Holstein dairy cattle. I am consequently one of a relatively small set of people who know how to make cows urinate on demand.  Really.

  From 1987-1990, my wife Nancy and I studied evolutionary, behavioral and physiological aspects of cooperative breeding in dwarf mongooses (Helogale parvula) in Serengeti National Park, working with Dr. Peter Waser and Dr Jon Rood, for my PhD at Purdue.  This work involved using demographic and molecular genetic data to calculate inclusive fitness costs and benefits, and using behavioral and endocrine data to identify the mechanisms responsible for reproductive suppression in socially subordinate adults.  
Some of the primary results of this research are found in these papers.

From 1991-1996, Nancy and I studied African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) in the Selous Game Reserve.  At  roughly 80,000 square kilometers, the Selous is one of the largest protected areas in the world, but its ecology is still little-studied.   This project focused initially on simply assessing the size of the wild dog population in Selous (a formidable task in itself), and progressed to identifying the ecological factors that cause wild dogs to be endangered, attaining uniformly low densities in comparison to other large carnivores that are well-protected by Tanzania's system of parks and reserves.  In this regard, interspecific competition plays a major role in limiting wild dog numbers and distributions.  We also used demographic data to make quantitative assessments of extinction risk, and collected a substantial data set on prey selection, predator-prey interactions and the costs/benefits of cooperative hunting. Finally we examined social evolution and behavioral and endocrine mechanisms of reproductive suppression in wild dogs, in a manner similar to our earlier work with dwarf mongooses.  Some of the major results of this work are found in these papers, and in Creel S & Creel N 2002. The African wild dog: behavior, ecology and conservation.  Princeton University Press.

Incidental to these studies, I've done some collaborative research on the behavioral ecology and evolution of lions, leopards, banded mongooses and slender mongooses, some of which is in these papers.