Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
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)
I am really grateful to UC for funding an internal grant that will support new social experiments with our quail system and the establishment of a brand new system where we will work on betta fish! My goal is to look at how both species respond to social perturbations and compare these results to those that my team has already collected for parakeets.… [Read full details]
Brent Stoffer and I are working on a new initiative to incorporate data science and coding into UC’s introductory biology course. We received funding from UC to start implementing these changes. See the overview of our plans in the video here
I developed a module for the course in 2021 which was based around using automated tracking data from penguins at the Cincinnati Zoo.… [Read full details]
We were really excited to have the chance to talk with Ann Thompson from WXVU recently about some of our work with bobwhite quail in the lab. Read more about our work with “the bobs” below, or check out the recording!… [Read full details]
Hobson Lab Capstone Undergraduate student Sophia Clemen just got her first research funding! She was awarded an undergraduate research fellowship to fund some of her capstone project work with “the bobs”, our bobwhite quail system. Sophia will be studying their vocalizations and will be recording their “bob-white” calls in the lab. … [Read full details]
Hobson Lab PhD Candidate Sanjay Prasher and Undergrad Capstone student Sophia Clemen both presented their research as posters at the 2022 Sensorium conference on Sensory Biology and Ecology here at the University of Cincinnati.
Sanjay presented on some of his new results from an agent-based model.… [Read full details]
Mike Miller did a nice overview of my recent paper “A Low-Cost Solution for Documenting, Tracking, and Verifying Cage-Level Animal Husbandry Tasks Using Wireless QR Scanners and Cloud-Based Spreadsheets“.
Read the full text here.
A University of Cincinnati biologist is using tech more commonly found in Amazon distribution warehouses to care for birds in her lab.
