Application): This is a competitive renewal from the University of California, Santa Cruz that proposes to continue its long-term objective of actively engaging underrepresented minority students and faculty on behavioral and biomedically relevant research in Argentina (Patagonia coast) and the Gulf of California in Sonora, Mexico. The research will continue to focus, primarily, on the biology of the several vertebrate species along the Patagonian and Gulf of California coasts. MIRT students will be involved in long term investigations of the effects run off pollutants on the food web of the Gulf of California especially the impact on top predator index species of marine mammals, birds and humans. The health of the food chain and fisheries of the Gulf of California has enormous health and economic consequences for the citizens of Mexico. In Argentina, studies will focus on physiological studies of the Southern elephant and seal which serves as a unexpected model of mammalian obesity, the physiological long term food and water abstinence. Results of these investigations have been shown to have clinical implications in the management of several severe human pathologies in the Americas and the Pacific Rim. These include obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and early childhood development and pathologies resulting from malnutrition and/or starvation. Since l993, when the UCSC-MIRT was initially funded, the program has trained 57 undergraduate/graduate students, of which 19 have admitted to PH.D programs.
