BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — If you’re a student at CSUB then you may have seen this small furry animal with a bushy tail and large ears.
What you may not know that the San Joaquin Kit Fox is an endangered species and one of its largest collections is at CSUB’s campus.
“I’ve always seen Kit Foxes. Every spring I saw pups emerging and was always, like, adorable to see. Right. But beside being just nice and adorable to see, you know, I also learned that this is one of the hotspots of urban kit foxes in Bakersfield,” said Dr. Antje Lauer, a biology professor at CSUB.
The kit is a subspecies of fox, native to Bakersfield and the American Southwest. There are only a few thousand left.
Dr. Lauer has made it her mission to monitor and map the campus kit foxes. She is using one modern and unique tool to do it: poop
“I go around and collect droppings of animals that look like from a member or from like other animals that are of interest. Right. And then with molecular tools like extracting DNA and PCR and sequencing, I can find out who poop there,” said Dr. Lauer. “And then I know, Oh, there’s this. A great gray fox that was they I not a kit fox or this was a red fox and not a kit Fox.”
With help from students, Dr Lauer was able to map the dens of foxes which were concentrated in the grassy parts of campus in the northeast. In those areas, the kit fox creates burrows or used old ones that were left by ground squirrels.
She also collected a map of sighting of the animals on campus. Many kit foxes venture from their dens and rummage through trashcans and dumpsters looking for their next meal.
Dr Laurer says that one sure way sign to know if a den has a Kit fox is a food wrapper nearby.
“I know there are all the studies are saying that the kid foxes here in Bakersfield have high cholesterol because they eat too much pizza and things like that, which there’s actually a published peer reviewed publication on this, which is not good for their health.”
Dr. Lauer wants the community to know the Kit Foxes play a key role in the local ecosystem.
“Preserving the foxes also means preserving land for biodiversity. Other animal species, plants, and just for an urban climate that is healthy because Bakersfield is expanding,” she said.
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