#Pika mouse archive

Loew Fellowship (awarded to KAS) and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum Research Internship in Science and Engineering (awarded to KAS ).

#Pika mouse archive

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All raw RNASeq data analyzed during the current study are available in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under accession numbers SAMN6697631-SAMN6697650.įunding: This work was supported by Stanford University The Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics (awarded to KAS ) The National Center for Biological Sciences the Stanford Professor Gilda H.

These results suggest that differences in gene expression may play a key role in enabling hypoxia tolerance on this local scale, indicating elevational flexibility that may facilitate successful range shifts in response to climate change.Ĭitation: Solari KA, Ramakrishnan U, Hadly EA (2018) Gene expression is implicated in the ability of pikas to occupy Himalayan elevational gradient. However, out of over 10,000 expressed transcripts, 26 were significantly upregulated at the 5,000 m site and were significantly enriched for pathways consistent with physiological compensation for limited oxygen. We collected RNA samples from one population of Ochotona roylei in the western Himalaya at three sites– 3,600, 4,000, and 5,000 meters–and found no evidence of significant population genetic structure nor positive selection among sites. Pikas (Family Ochotonidae), cold-specialist small mammal species, are already undergoing elevational range shifts. However, with elevation increase comes oxygen decline, potentially limiting a species’ ability to track its environment depending on what mechanisms it has available to compensate for hypoxic stress. Willard Marriott Library, CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 U.S.Species are shifting their ranges due to climate change, many moving to cooler and higher locations. The song is used mostly by males during mating season, although females use the call in the fall.Īudio Credit: Western Soundscape Archive at the University of Utah J. The call is used to warn other pikas of a predator or intruder, and it sounds a little like the bleat of a goat. The American pika is a very vocal animal! It uses both call and song vocalizations. It spends most of the day sunning itself on the rocks foraging for food guarding its territory or watching for predators like eagles, hawks, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, ermine, and weasels. The American pika has a lifespan of six to seven years in the wild. The female may then mate again and have a second litter. The babies leave their mother after four weeks and are adult size in about three months. The babies are weaned in about three to four weeks. The female gives birth to two to four babies in the spring. Mating season typically runs from late April to early July. The American pika first mates about one month before the snow starts to melt. If its supply runs low, it forages for lichen and cushion plants. It eats food it has stored in the winter. After the vegetation dries, the pika moves it to its den deep in the rocks. It eats some food on the spot, and it carries some food away to store in a pile or ' haystack.'Ī pika haystack can contain as much as a bushel of plant matter! The pika often moves the pile to protect it from rain or to find a better drying spot. It eats a variety of green plants like grasses, sedges, thistles, and fireweed.