Mike Miller at UC News did a nice write up of the lab’s new paper that also touched on some of our recent fieldwork. See the full article here.
New paper & fieldwork coverage from UC
NSF grant funded! Vampire bat cooperation
The first big grant for the new Hobson Lab was funded by the NSF!!
The research focuses on sociality in vampire bats across many different levels, from individuals to relationships, to network structures. The work is in collaboration with Gerry Carter and Ian Hamilton at the Ohio State University.… [Read full details]
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]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]
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]
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]
Processing #Pruittdata: an ode to data, data collection, and data analysts
In trying to wrap my brain around the effects of #Pruittdata, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I collaborate, who I trust, and how I approach the process of doing science. The following is my thought process, trying to deal with the aftermath.… [Read full details]
Welcome Annemarie van der Marel!
Dr. Annemarie van der Marel joined the Hobson Lab this week as our first Postdoctoral Researcher! Annemarie did her PhD at the University of Manitoba with Dr. Jane Waterman, focusing on squirrel behavior.
Here in the Hobson Lab, she’ll be leading the relaunch of our Monk Parakeet projects, looking at sociality, decision-making, and cognition in this highly successful invasive parrot species. … [Read full details]
Talk for UC Ornithology Club
I was invited to give a talk at the UC Ornithology Club‘s meeting. The club meets every-other Wednesday from 6:30-7:30pm on campus. They seem like a great group and have lots of field trips planned.
It was really fun to give my birdy-est talk possible, featuring my previous and on-going work with 14 species of parrots as well as highlighting upcoming work in my lab with Monk Parakeets, Bobwhite Quail, and Little Blue Penguins.… [Read full details]
Recruiting field assistants for March 2020!
I am currently recruiting 3-4 field assistants to collect data and run social experiments with Monk Parakeets. The goal of this project is to determine how social groups respond to perturbations. We will allow parakeets to interact in a group in a large semi-natural flight pen and collect observations of social interactions in order to quantify social structures like dominance hierarchies and affiliation networks.… [Read full details]