With funding from the Offield Family Foundation, the Edmands Lab is collaborating with Xiaoming Wang’s lab at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum to study genetics and evolution of the Channel Island Fox. Island foxes descended from mainland gray foxes, and are approximately one-third smaller. There are six distinct subspecies of the island fox and several have experienced severe population crashes followed by partial demographic recoveries. Dissertation work by Nicole Adams assessed the scat microbiome in foxes from each island, providing a metric of fox health and a baseline for future non-invasive monitoring (Adams et al. 2021). In addition, Nicole’s work showed that despite recent recoveries in fox population numbers, genomic variation on some islands has declined since the bottlenecks, potentially limiting the foxes’ ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions (Adams & Edmands 2023). Recently, Kimberly Schoenberger has begun dissertation work on island foxes. Kimberly’s planned work will combine studies of skeletal morphology, bone histology and genomics to understand the genetic basis of body size and domestication in island foxes.
