favorite critters

Today I am showing a picture I took this morning of one of my favorite critters. Those of you reading this probably already know me well enough to know that tucos and orcas top the list. Tucos came into my life unexpectedly when I went to school to finish my undergraduate degree in biology. They became the focus of my graduate work and I can proudly say that this critter, very similar to a gopher, will be the reason I can be called Dr. Woodruff some day. It's a crazy world.
This female tuco is pregnant and in about 1.5 months will produce a litter of ~4 pups, hopefully 2 females and 2 males so that I can look at early environment experiences in a gender-balanced way. I'm mostly interested in social behavior, and these animals, well the females anyway, live in kin groups. However, some disperse to live alone. My advisor, Eileen Lacey, looks at things like reproductive success and survival between those living in groups and those living alone. I, look at their poop. Well, I collect their poop and extract the "stress" hormones (the metabolites of corticosterone) that get excreted. I've found differences between the two social systems... what do you think? Which do you think might carry the higher concentrations of stress hormones, group living or lone?
The cool thing about my study is that I get to look at animals we have at Berkeley in the lab as well as the free-living ones in Argentina. Every year, for the past five years, I've traveled down to the southwest Patagonian region to catch or wait for tucos to pop up. Below is a picture of one in the process of digging her burrow. It's a pretty cool adventure and I'll be telling you more about it once I get down there next month. If you'd have asked me 10 years ago what I'd be doing with my life as I near the 50 year old mark, the last thing I might have said was going to South America to collect rodent poop, but there you have it... life's a funny thing.