Fitzpatrick Lab

I joined Fitzpatrick Lab as an undergraduate researcher in Fall 2023. In this semester, I enrolled in BIOL-291 to familiarize myself with the workings and culture of biological research. During Fall 2024-Spring 2025, I continued with the same lab into BIOL-491 Honors. I took on a research project in which I measured the depth of female baboons' estrous swellings (that is, the posterior distance between the ischial callosity and the edge of the swelling) from field photographs. The length and width of these individuals had already been measured, but not the depth (Fitzpatrick et al., 2014). My work was both to help fully characterize this trait in three dimensions and to assess the reliability of this photogrammetric method applied to a lateral view. I assessed an inventory of 385 photographs, 214 of which I classified as useful for measurement. I then took 10 measurements from each of the 214 photographs using a procedure developed collaboratively by P.I. Dr. Courtney Fitzpatrick, graduate student researcher Ruby Mustill, and I. I converted these pixel measurements to millimeters using the equation developed by Fitzpatrick et al. (2014), which is applicable because these photographs were taken using the same camera as those in that study. We are currently analyzing this data for correlation between swelling width, length, and depth within individual-cycle.

Fitzpatrick, C.L., Altmann, J. & Alberts, S.C. (2014). Sources of variance in a female fertility signal: exaggerated estrous swellings in a natural population of baboons. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 68, 1109–1122. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-014-1722-y