Meet Darren, Graduate Ambassador
The only common thread among all of Darren's pursuits is his ceaseless search for a good story. After completing his undergraduate degree in 2004 as a Biology and Natural Resources double-major at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, he moved to Las Cruces to work as a research technician for Jornada Experimental Range - but also to see what kinds of fascinating stories the desert would yield.
Hailing from a tiny town in rural eastern Maine, Las Cruces is by far the largest place he has ever lived. Although he missed the forest and ocean, Darren was immediately taken with the people, the desert and the prominent way that history bore itself out in culture and landscape. Extant volcanoes, abundant archaeological sites, and lingering animal tracks chronicled the legacy of disturbance everywhere. Darren wanted to learn about them all.
"I never sought out ecology," says Darren. "I guess I kind of arrived at it. It's at once interesting, contentious and infuriating. A lot of the meaning we glean from it depends on the values we bring to it, so maybe it’s ultimately narcissistic.”
When the possibility arose of completing a master’s degree while working concurrently at his job, Darren jumped at the chance. He felt that NMSU’s Wildlife Science department was a great fit for his interests in natural history and organismal biology. He also hoped that the master’s degree would enable him to take his scientific abilities to the next level by allowing him to identify his own research question and to design a study to investigate it.
What does he want to examine? The interaction of predator-prey behavior strategies during trophic cascades.
“Ecologists always seem interested in how the relative importance of bottom-up versus top-down processes varies over space and time,” says Darren. “The heavy rains we received over a year ago, which were a bottom-up process, caused a large increase in plant growth across the landscape. Soon the rabbit and rodent populations responded in kind, and then the mesocarnivores who prey upon them. Now, since their numbers are still large and we’re in a dry spell, they’re exerting a top-down effect by hammering the vegetation. There are all kinds of stories playing out within this setting. I just need to decide which one I want to tell.”
