Modeling Growth and Senescence in North American Red Squirrels

We developed models to describe lifetime growth in North American red squirrels and implemented them in R to extract biologically meaningful insights. Our analysis revealed that red squirrel growth is best captured by a parameterized arctangent function at both the population and individual levels. Using these models, we also discovered that growth does not account for fitness differences between males and females except in the case of heavier females, who tend to exhibit higher lifetime reproductive success.

May 2020 - December 2022

Top: Some of the models used to represent squirrel weight over time

Bottom: Arctangent model fit to different sets of the data

Photo source: Cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_red_squirrel#/media/File:Tamiasciurus_hudsonicus_CT.jpg