Female mule deer are often considered a monolith, a single group full of individuals utterly indistinguishable from the others. Ten years later, she graduated with her master’s and then Ph.D. as part of one of the world’s longest-running, continuous studies on mule deer. Tayler LaSharr, center, runs biological tests and fits a mule deer with a tracking collar during an aerial capture operation Dec. 7, 2023, near Superior. A retention problemEach of the all-star cast of female wildlife professionals from the past handful of years took their own roads after finishing school. Jakopak went to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, and LaSharr stayed in academia and is a teacher and researcher at Utah State University.