research
overview
A cane toad with a radio tag during a tracking study in French Guiana in 2020.
I am broadly interested in neuroethology, or how an animal’s brain controls its behavior.
During my doctoral work with Lauren O’Connell at the Laboratory of Organismal Biology at Stanford University, I focused on spatial cognition in amphibians, studying how well they navigate and how amphibian brains encode spatial information.
I worked with cane toads (Rhinella marina), both in the field and laboratory, to study their navigation behavior and the brain activity supporting it.
Now, working with Dr. Andrius Pašukonis at the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology in Vienna, I am studying how neotropical poison frogs learn locations important for parental care.
research highlights
We showed that cane toads in both native and invasive ranges are capable of navigating home following displacements of up to 1 km!
An invasive cane toad in Hawaii.
Analysis of brain activity related to homing revealed that the medial pallium (aka the amphibian hippocampus) is involved in navigation, alongside other brain regions
A ‘slice’ of toad brain with labelled brain regions. Mp is the medial pallium
We pioneered the use of a novel technology called flexible mesh electronics to enable recordings in awake, mobile animals.
A cane toad implanted with flexible mesh electronics.
publications
Shaykevich, D. A., Pareja-Mejía, D., Golde, C., Pašukonis, A., & O'Connell, L. A. (2025). Neural and sensory basis of homing behaviour in the invasive cane toad, Rhinella marina. Proceedings B, 292(2041), 20250045. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2025.0045
(Preprint) Shaykevich, D. A., Woods, G. A., O’Connell, L. A., & Hong, G. (2024). Chronic recording of brain activity in awake toads. bioRxiv. ] doi: 10.1101/2024.10.16.618567
(Preprint) Goolsby, B. C., Fischer, M. T., Chen, T. G., Pareja-Mejía, D., Shaykevich, D. A., Lewis, A. R., ... & O’Connell, L. A. (2024). Home security cameras as a tool for behavior observations and science affordability. bioRxiv, 2023-04. doi: 10.1101/2023.04.17.537238
Delia, J., Gaines-Richardson, M., Ludington, S. C., Akbari, N., Vasek, C., Shaykevich, D., & O’Connell, L. A. (2023). Tissue-specific in vivo transformation of plasmid DNA in Neotropical tadpoles using electroporation. Plos one, 18(8), e0289361. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289361
Pašukonis, A., Serrano-Rojas, S. J., Fischer, M. T., Loretto, M. C., Shaykevich, D. A., Rojas, B., ... & O'Connell, L. A. (2022). Contrasting parental roles shape sex differences in poison frog space use but not navigational performance. Elife, 11, e80483. doi: 10.7554/eLife.80483
Shaykevich, D. A., Pašukonis, A., & O'Connell, L. A. (2022). Long distance homing in the cane toad (Rhinella marina) in its native range. Journal of Experimental Biology, 225(2), jeb243048. doi: 10.1242/jeb.243048