University of Denver Autumn 2024

Mount Blue Sky’s looming peak can be seen from Denver, as far south as Castle Rock and as far north as Fort Collins. Predators like mountain lions and black bears roam the windswept terrain, preying on bighorn sheep, mountain goats, marmots and pikas. Among the mammals lives the deer mouse, a seemingly inconsequential animal that can be seen scurrying among rocks and alpine tundra way above the tree line. Up so high, where the air is thin and predators are few, the mice eke out a living in an unforgiving atmosphere—a place where most among us struggle to breathe, let alone make a home. While the deer mouse may be easy to miss amidst the more physically impressive and photogenic mountain goats that call Mount Blue Sky home, the Velotta Lab team are singularly captivated by this tiny mammal. Why? Deer mice possess the answer to a question that has interested researchers for years: How do these mice survive—and thrive— at the world’s highest altitudes? Velotta’s study of deer mice began long before his tenure at DU. While he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montana, Velotta began working with his advisor, Zac Cheviron, to study the adaptation of deer mice to high elevations in the Rockies. Cheviron’s own advisor had been doing the same work at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for more than two decades. When a job opened up at DU in 2020, Velotta said it felt serendipitous. “Since about 2015, I had been coming down here every year from Montana and studying these populations,” he explains. Now, Velotta gets to continue the work of his advisor (and his advisor’s advisor) much closer to the environments they study.

Professor Jon Velotta sits next to the old A-frame building at the summit of Mount Blue Sky, holding a metal trap used to catch deer mice.

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