PhD Candidate (2020-present)

Hello! I am studying factors influencing cache spoilage in a declining population of Canada jays in Algonquin Provincial Park, ON. These little birds are fascinating in many ways including having one of the largest submandibular salivary glands to body size ratio of all birds. I am investigating to see if their saliva acts as a cache preservative through a multi-year field experiment and untargeted metabolomic profiling. Another part of my thesis focuses on the fact that they are one of a handful of long-term perishable food cachers, making them uniquely sensitive to trends associated with climate change. I am experimentally testing the effects of different freeze-thaw conditions in a controlled laboratory environment to understand how intensity, frequency, and duration of freeze-thaw events affect cache spoilage to fill the current gap in the literature. Drawing from these results, I am building population models to identify which climatic conditions are linked to low reproductive performance in the Algonquin Canada jay. Understanding the causes of decline is an imperative first step to building a framework for the conservation of a species.

I obtained my H.BSc from Queen’s University in 2019 in Biology and worked as a field technician on reducing road mortality in Gray Ratsnakes, population monitoring in Tree Swallows at the Queen’s University Biological Station (QUBS), and the organization and digitization of the Queen’s University natural history collection. Outside of work, I am either covered in chalk at the climbing gym or tending to my many pets (vertebrate, invertebrate, and botanical).

Publication

Ong, K., Norris, D. R. (2025). Experimental evidence demonstrating how freeze-thaw patterns affect spoilage of perishable cached food. PLoS ONE, 20(4), e0319043. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0319043