Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
We are recruiting student volunteers or work/study students to help with data collection in the lab.
Work with PhD student Sanjay Prasher to assist in his research on bobwhite quail sociality. Sanjay recorded hours of video of quail moving around and interacting with each other in a flight pen.… [Read full details]
Inferred Attractiveness: A generalized mechanism for sexual selection that can maintain variation in traits and preferences over time
Emily H. DuVal, Courtney L. Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Maria R. Servedio
PLOS Biology: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002269
Sexual selection by mate choice is a powerful force that can lead to evolutionary change, and models of why females choose particular mates are central to understanding its effects.… [Read full details]
Grace has a new paper now out in PLOS Computational Biology!
Grace Smith-Vidaurre , Valeria Pérez-Marrufo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Alejandro Salinas-Melgoza, Timothy F. Wright
Animals can actively encode different types of identity information in learned communication signals, such as group membership or individual identity.… [Read full details]
Kim Cuddington, Karen C Abbott, Frederick R Adler, Mehmet Aydeniz, Rene Dale, Louis J Gross, Alan Hastings, Elizabeth A Hobson, Vadim A Karatayev, Alexander Killion, Aasakiran Madamanchi, Michelle L Marraffini, Audrey L McCombs, Widodo Samyono, Shin-Han Shiu, Karen H Watanabe, Easton R White
This paper came out of a NIMBioS workshop called “Quantitative Education in Life Science Graduate Programs“
New graduate students in biology programs may lack the quantitative skills necessary for their research and professional careers.… [Read full details]
Our new paper, led by Vanessa Ferdinand, was published in the theme issue “Mixed-species groups and aggregations: shaping ecological and behavioural patterns and processes” (compiled and edited by Nora V. Carlson, Todd M. Freeberg, Eben Goodale, and Anne Heloise Theo) in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. … [Read full details]
Grace just signed her offer and will be starting a tenure track faculty job at Michigan State in 2024!!! This is so exciting and I am really looking forward to continuing our collaboration and seeing Grace build her group. She’ll be recruiting soon!… [Read full details]
A new paper, led by Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel, was just published!
In this paper, we wanted to test whether social history was an important factor in rank dynamics in captive groups of monk parakeets. My previous results, using computational approaches, suggested that this was the case, but we really wanted to conduct experimental manipulations to test it in action.… [Read full details]
Mike Miller did a great press release for our recent paper on rank dynamics and social history in monk parakeets. Thanks Mike!
Stephen Hawking famously said showing up is half the battle.
Huge congratulations to Darby for winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!!
Darby will join my lab as a PhD student in Fall 2023 and will work on merging conservation practices with animal behavior and sociality in parrots. She joins the lab after two years as a post-bac on our parakeet crews in 2022 and 2023. … [Read full details]
I am very grateful to UC for funding an internal grant proposal to support new work with our bobwhite quail.
I’ll be recruiting undergrads to help with this research soon! Visit this page for information.
From UC’s Office of Research Press Release: (see the full version here)
