Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
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]
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]
Congratulations to Hobson Lab PhD student Sanjay Prasher, whose grant proposal “Effects of foraging success on social network centrality in bobwhite quail” just got funded by the Sigma Xi Grants in Aid of Research program!!
This is Sanjay’s first research grant, and will kick start some of our new work in the lab with quail social dynamics and social learning.… [Read full details]
Congratulations to Hobson Lab undergraduate student Shruti Parashar!
Shruti did a great job summarizing several analyses of Little Blue Penguin social behavior during her very first scientific presentation, called “Analyzing social relationships of Little Blue Penguins”.
Shruti has been a member of the Hobson Lab Penguin Data Club since Fall 2019 (our very first semester!).… [Read full details]
Hobson Lab Postdoc Annemarie posted an updated version of our paper on deciding whether to pool behaviors prior to network analyses. The preprint is available on arXiv here.
Current Hobson Lab postdoc Dr. Annemarie van der Marel and soon-to-be Hobson Lab postdoc Grace Smith Vidaurre will both be giving seminar talks next week as part of UC Biology’s seminar series.
Annemarie will be giving her talk “Socioecological environment of group-living environments”.… [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]
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]
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]
With our parakeet field season cancelled, the crew evacuated, and plans for bringing animals into our lab for empirical research on hold, I’ve transitioned almost my entire group over to learning how to use computational models. These are great skills to have anyway, and things I wanted my group to learn at some point, so now seems like a good time for an introduction to modeling!… [Read full details]