Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
Grace just signed her offer and will be starting a tenure track faculty job at Michigan State in 2024!!! This is so exciting and I am really looking forward to continuing our collaboration and seeing Grace build her group. She’ll be recruiting soon!… [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 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?
Chelsea is a new PhD student in the Hobson Lab who started in January 2021. She earned her undergraduate degree at Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she studied behavioral ecology of California ground squirrels in Dr. Jenn Smith’s lab.… [Read full details]
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]
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]
Before Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel began working on parakeets, she did her PhD research working with squirrels. She just had a nice paper published from her work on Barbary ground squirrels.
Congratulations Annemarie!
Abstract: (From The Journal of Mammalogy)
Research on sociality in temperate ground-dwelling squirrels has focused on female philopatry and other life history trade-offs, which are influenced by constraints in the duration of the active growing season.
… [Read full details]
Dr. Annemarie van der Marel joined the Hobson Lab this week as our first Postdoctoral Researcher! Annemarie did her PhD at the University of Manitoba with Dr. Jane Waterman, focusing on squirrel behavior.
Here in the Hobson Lab, she’ll be leading the relaunch of our Monk Parakeet projects, looking at sociality, decision-making, and cognition in this highly successful invasive parrot species. … [Read full details]