Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
I recently reviewed the book Thinking like a Parrot: Perspectives from the Wild by Alan Bond & Judy Diamond. My review was published in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America.
The full text is available here: [link to full text]… [Read full details]
Xavier is a new PhD student in the Hobson Lab who started in August 2020. He did his undergrad work at Case Western Reserve University, where he did his senior project on gorilla behavior at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.… [Read full details]
Claire is a new PhD student in the Hobson Lab who started in August 2020. She did her undergrad work at Mississippi State University, where she helped with a project using camera traps to monitor scavenger activity. Prior to joining the lab, Claire worked as a field technician studying the effects of forest management on the diversity and relative abundance of breeding songbirds in various parts of Illinois and as an intern at the Hastings Reserve studying cooperatively breeding acorn woodpeckers.… [Read full details]
I’ve been working with Katie Kalafut and the Cincinnati Zoo for about a year now with their Little Blue Penguin movement database. Katie started collecting RFID data on the penguins to estimate how much time each was swimming and now my group is also following up with some more socially-focused analyses.… [Read full details]
There are limited opportunities for a small group of students to conduct penguin behavioral observations in person at the zoo, under the supervision of Hannah Griebling (University of British Columbia).
If you are interested in this opportunity, please out your information in this form (https://forms.gle/8y3EXZQK64ofwfuK6… [Read full details]
I am currently recruiting undergraduate students interested in gaining data science and analytical skills. “Penguin Data Club” is a weekly meeting for undergrads at the University of Cincinnati. Working in collaboration with Dr. Katie Kalafut and the Cincinnati Zoo, we will dig into the social lives of Little Blue Penguins.… [Read full details]
Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel will be presenting the first empirical work from the new Hobson Lab work with sociality in Monk Parakeets.
This talk highlights some of the work in our recent preprint (with current/soon to be Hobson Lab grad students Sanjay Prasher, Chelsea Carminito, and Claire O’Connell).… [Read full details]
We were happy to hear that two new chicks have hatched into our parakeet population! We look forward to including these two new birds into our social experiments, hopefully starting in January (fieldwork is of course pending the state of the pandemic).… [Read full details]
I did a little consulting for the PBS Kids show Wild Kratts for an episode on parrots. The episode was released this summer and it was fun to see how they incorporated the science into the show!
Some of the science they profiled is from my 2017 paper with Don Brightsmith and Gustavo Martinez.… [Read full details]
My group just posted a preprint from some of our new data on social interactions in parakeets. Congratulations to the team for writing this up during a pandemic and salvaging data from our cut-very-short/cancelled field season!!
The manuscript is available on arXiv and is currently in review at Current Zoology.… [Read full details]