Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
Congratulations to Kalem Schrock, who presented his work on the Sociality Game at the recent National Diversity in STEM conference in Puerto Rico! Kalem was an REU student in my lab this summer and did a great job on a fun interdisciplinary project where we are developing an online multiplayer game to better teach students about data science.… [Read full details]
My postdoc Grace Smith-Vidaurre just posted a new preprint about her work with monk parakeet vocalizations. The preprint is posted on EcoEvoRxiv.
Animals can actively encode different types of identity information in communication signals, such as group membership, individual identity, or social status.… [Read full details]
New preprint is available on ecoevorxiv here! With gorgeous art by V. Darby Moore.
We used data on 12 species of parrots who form mixed species groups to eat clay from exposed cliffs along rivers in Peru to determine the simplest methods each species could be using to make co-occurrence and joining decisions involving other species.… [Read full details]
New paper, led by Allison Roth!! See the full text here at Behavioral Ecology
There exists growing evidence that animal personality (consistent between individual differences in behavior) can influence an individual’s fitness. Furthermore, limitations in behavioral plasticity may cause personality-mediated tradeoffs to occur, for example, between speed and accuracy in decision making.… [Read full details]
I was invited to contribute to a new comparative psychology textbook, and roped one of my favorite collaborators into writing a chapter together. The book is now out! It’s available here.
In our chapter, Gerry and I wrote about how cooperation and conflict are really two sides of the same coin, and tend to be much more similar than many initially appreciate.… [Read full details]
With Marcela Benítez, I co-organized a symposium at the Animal Behavior Conference focused on Social Competency. We had a great mix of speakers, with some longer keynote talks, regular research talks, and several short lightning talks all centered on work touching on ideas of social competency in animals.… [Read full details]
Annemarie led our latest work on parakeet social dynamics and posted a preprint with our early results. The preprint is available on ecoevorxiv here.
Coming soon: more replication from our two additional groups in 2022! Preprint will be updated soon.
Dominance hierarchies direct and structure aggression in a myriad of species.… [Read full details]
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]
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]
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]