Lunch with a Scientist is an ongoing monthly lecture series at Cedar Creek. Each month, scientists present a general-audience lecture about their work at or related to Cedar Creek and take questions from the audience.
The series has been running since January 2019 as an in-person program. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was shifted online in April 2020, from which point recordings are available. Programs take place on the second Tuesday of each month (11:30am central time), either in-person at Cedar Creek, via zoom, or both. Details about speakers and delivery mode are at
https://cbs.umn.edu/cedarcreek/public-programs/lunch-scientistOctober's Lunch with a Scientist welcomed naturalist, tracker and educator Jon Poppele for a deep dive into the way animals move and what we can learn from analyzing their gaits. Wildlife trackers study track patterns to visualize animal movement, interpret behavior and “become the animal” they are tracking. This can include interpreting an animal’s relative speed. Trackers often infer the speed of a symmetrical gait based on the relative positions of the front and hind footprints in a track pattern, which I refer to as the overstep hypothesis. This talk explored track pattern data from two common species, the coyote (Canis latrans) and the domestic cat (Felis catus), using the well-established correlation between stride length and speed, and present a general model of overstep as a function of stride length and relative limb phase.