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New paper: Ground squirrel sociality

Before Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel began working on parakeets, she did her PhD research working with squirrels. She just had a nice paper published from her work on Barbary ground squirrels.

Congratulations Annemarie!

Social organization in a North African ground squirrel

Abstract: (From The Journal of Mammalogy)

Research on sociality in temperate ground-dwelling squirrels has focused on female philopatry and other life history trade-offs, which are influenced by constraints in the duration of the active growing season.

… [Read full details]
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Agent-based modeling reading group

With our parakeet field season cancelled, the crew evacuated, and plans for bringing animals into our lab for empirical research on hold, I’ve transitioned almost my entire group over to learning how to use computational models. These are great skills to have anyway, and things I wanted my group to learn at some point, so now seems like a good time for an introduction to modeling!… [Read full details]

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Parakeet research: pool party!

The parakeets adapted rapidly to life in the flight pen. On the first day, just hours after releasing them into the flight pen, the birds were already behaving normally and exploring the pen. This is a short video of the group throwing a “pool party” and taking baths in one of their water dishes.… [Read full details]

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Parakeet field season 2020

This year’s crew was led by Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel who was joined by awesome field assistants Chelsea Carminito, Claire O’Connell, and Alexa P. Our goal was to collect new social interaction data from parakeet groups. The plan was to conduct several “social perturbations”, each time removing an individual from the group and seeing how the group responded.… [Read full details]