Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
We just posted a new preprint “Social manipulations disentangle rank effects of individual characteristics and social history”. This paper was led by Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel, with support from Hobson Lab PhD students Xavier Francis, Claire O’Connell, Chelsea Carminito, and our former postbac Cesar Estien (who is currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley).… [Read full details]
Hobson Lab Masters student (and postdoc with CREW at the Cincinnati Zoo) Julie Barnes got pulled in on an exciting project recently — the zoo asked for her help getting an ultrasound on their pregnant hippo!
Check out the story here:
How do you perform an ultrasound on a hippopotamus?
Led by Anshuman Swain and with co-authors Sara Williams and Louisa Di Felice, we have a new paper out now in Animal Behaviour! We used an existing dataset to dig into the previously unexplained noise surrounding task switching in an ant species.… [Read full details]
New work, led by Cesar Estien, is now posted as a preprint!
Cesar Omar Estien, Claire L. O’Connell, Xavier Francis, Grace Smith-Vidaurre, Bryan M. Kluever, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Anne Marie van der Marel
Human-wildlife interactions continue to increase due to anthropogenic disturbances, with some interactions resulting in conflict.… [Read full details]
I was really excited to give a seminar to the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, & Culture Speaker Series.
The talk was recorded and is available here: https://youtu.be/malhns2KGvw … [Read full details]
I was really excited to be a guest on the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast.
Listen to the episode here: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/78
FEBRUARY 24TH, 2022 | 01:13:37 | E78
EPISODE NOTES
Irrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order.… [Read full details]
Mike Miller with UC Press wrote a nice overview of our new special issue on dominance hierarchies, published earlier this week.
Link to the article: https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2022/01/pecking-order–uc-biologist-explains-100-years-of-dominance-hierarchies.html
Dominance hierarchies were first described in chickens a century ago by a Norwegian zoologist who coined the term “pecking order.”
Eli Strauss, Dai Shizuka, James Curley, and I recently co-edited a special issue all about dominance hierarchies. For the issue, Eli led a new paper that compiles datasets on over 100 species for which dominance data have been published. Our team also built an R package to more easily manage these datasets (to make comparative analyses much easier) and to run basic dominance hierarchy summaries. … [Read full details]
For the new special issue I co-edited with Eli Strauss, Dai Shizuka, and James Curley on dominance hierarchy research, I wrote a fun paper about the dynamics of publications in nearly 100 years of research. I used a science of science approach to take a bird’s eye view of publication patterns as well as the use of terms in titles across decades.… [Read full details]
Eli Strauss, Dai Shizuka, James Curley, and I recently co-edited a special issue all about dominance hierarchies. It was just published in Phil Trans B.
Eli led a nice introduction to the issue that integrates some classic quotes and thinking about dominance hierarchies with modern approaches to highlight new insights and connections with the foundations of the field. … [Read full details]