Mammal March Madness Injects Fun into Science

It’s the ultimate showdown of athleticism. A tournament of champions that comes once a year. That’s right, it’s time for the fourth annual Mammal March Madness hosted by Arizona State Univ. (ASU).

What? Did you think we were talking about basketball?

Hosted on Prof. Katie Hinde’s blog, the event last year attracted around 180,000 people to her site.

“A lot of laypeople think of science as dry and dusty and memorization of a lot of facts,” said Hinde, of the university’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Center for Evolution and Medicine, to ASU Now. “What it really is is one of the most creative things you can do. You have to think and imagine things about the world in order to design the studies we do. This is an opportunity for us to celebrate the imagination of science.”



Mammal March Madness isn’t some real gladiatorial match between unsuspecting mammals thrown into a ring. It’s a simulation, but one based on scientific reasoning.

“Scientific literature is cited to substantiate likely outcomes as a probabilistic function of the two species’ attributes within the battle environment. Attributes considered in calculating battle outcome include temperament, weaponry, armor, body mass, running speed, fight style, physiology, and motivation,” according to Hinde’s blog. “Through the scientific information embedded in the bout descriptions, participants are educated about inter-species interactions, the importance of ecological context, how natural selection has shaped adaptations, and conservation management of endangered species.”

This year the 60 species have been divvied up into four divisions: chill mammals, mighty giants, mammal mascots, and mammals of the nouns. Competitors across the divisions include the polar bear, the snow leopard, the giant panda, the giant flying squirrel, the Yale (Univ.) bulldog, the Penn State mountain lion, and the wolf of the tundra, among many others.

In the matchups, the creature better-ranked has the home court advantage, meaning the match is simulated in their habitat.

“We reach a consensus on the probability of what the outcome will be,” Hinde said to ASU Now. “Sometimes it’s a 98 percent chance and sometimes it’s a one percent chance. In the wild, the lion doesn’t always get the antelope. Things that are unexpected can happen.”