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.
The Hobson Lab at the University of Cincinnati is recruiting 1-3 field assistants to collect data and run social experiments with captive groups of Monk Parakeets in large outdoor flight pens.
The field season is 5 months. Fieldwork will start in the beginning of January 2023 and end by early June 2023.… [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]
The Hobson Lab at the University of Cincinnati is recruiting 1-2 field assistants to collect data and run social experiments with captive groups of Monk Parakeets in large outdoor flight pens.
Fieldwork will start in the beginning of Feb 2022 and end by early June.… [Read full details]
Our lab has a new paper out in Current Zoology!
The paper was led by Hobson Lab postdoctoral researcher Annemarie van der Marel and co-authored by Hobson Lab PhD students Sanjay Prasher, Chelsea Carminito, Claire O’Connell, Hobson Lab field assistant (Spring 2020) Alexa Phillips, and collaborator Bryan Kluever.… [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]
The parakeets adapted rapidly to life in the flight pen. On the first day, just hours after releasing them into the flight pen, the birds were already behaving normally and exploring the pen. This is a short video of the group throwing a “pool party” and taking baths in one of their water dishes.… [Read full details]
