Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
Congratulations to Raven on a really fun empirical/modeling paper on movement and inferences about sociality in vampire bats. This work was part of the NSF grant my lab has with Gerry Carter.
Social structure can emerge from hierarchically embedded scales of movement, where movement at one scale is constrained within a larger scale (e.g.… [Read full details]
With an awesome team, led by founding editor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, I’m excited to have our new journal launched today!
Our first papers with npj Complexity are now posted. Visit this link to read our founding editorial, where we lay out our plans for the journal.… [Read full details]
Inferred Attractiveness: A generalized mechanism for sexual selection that can maintain variation in traits and preferences over time
Emily H. DuVal, Courtney L. Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Maria R. Servedio
PLOS Biology: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002269
Sexual selection by mate choice is a powerful force that can lead to evolutionary change, and models of why females choose particular mates are central to understanding its effects.… [Read full details]
Grace has a new paper now out in PLOS Computational Biology!
Grace Smith-Vidaurre , Valeria Pérez-Marrufo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Alejandro Salinas-Melgoza, Timothy F. Wright
Animals can actively encode different types of identity information in learned communication signals, such as group membership or individual identity.… [Read full details]
Kim Cuddington, Karen C Abbott, Frederick R Adler, Mehmet Aydeniz, Rene Dale, Louis J Gross, Alan Hastings, Elizabeth A Hobson, Vadim A Karatayev, Alexander Killion, Aasakiran Madamanchi, Michelle L Marraffini, Audrey L McCombs, Widodo Samyono, Shin-Han Shiu, Karen H Watanabe, Easton R White
This paper came out of a NIMBioS workshop called “Quantitative Education in Life Science Graduate Programs“
New graduate students in biology programs may lack the quantitative skills necessary for their research and professional careers.… [Read full details]
Our new paper, led by Vanessa Ferdinand, was published in the theme issue “Mixed-species groups and aggregations: shaping ecological and behavioural patterns and processes” (compiled and edited by Nora V. Carlson, Todd M. Freeberg, Eben Goodale, and Anne Heloise Theo) in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. … [Read full details]
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]
The first paper on our bobwhite quail research is out! You can read the full open-access version here in Animal Behavior and Cognition.
This paper explains the quality control system we have for tracking and double-checking our animal care for “the bobs”.… [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]