Related research interests
Although my focus of attention is primates, I also research interactions at the level of food resource-use and partitioning between leaf and fruiting-eating primates and other fruit eating arboreal mammals and between primates and birds, bats and leaf-cutting ants. This has meant spending much time observing the behavior of this non-primate fauna, with the aim of documenting and understanding how ecological space and resources are shared by very distinct forest canopy dwellers/users.
Bats have also been of importance to my global research activities in the forest. Here I have focused on profiling the structure and composition of bat communities in protected and unprotected forests. I have also studied bat communities in naturally fragmented landscapes to further understand species behavioral and ecological flexibility in their response to human-induced habitat fragmentation. My study sites are in Los Tuxtlas, southeast Mexico, and in the Petenes ecosystem in the Yucatan peninsula (in collaboration with Dr. Salvador Montiel from CINVESTAV-Merida). To achieve this and to measure bat presence and activity levels in each habitat, we use mist-nets and ultrasound detectors.
Other research interests have led me to investigate the structure of populations of terrestrial mammals in protected and unprotected forests in several sites in southeast Mexico. This involves the use of camera-traps, scent traps, sand-traps for foot tracks and diurnal and nocturnal surveys.
