News

New paper on vampire bat social relationships is now out! Long-term cooperative relationships among vampire bats are not strongly predicted by their initial interactions. Gerald G. Carter, Simon P. Ripperger, Vi Girbino, M. May Dixon, Imran Razik, Rachel A. Page, Elizabeth A. Hobson. Annals of the New York Academy of ...
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Congratulations to Emily DuVal on winning the Katma Award! The AOS Katma Award recognizes papers proposing ideas or testing theories that replace current dogma or settled opinion and that could change the course of thinking about the biology of birds. Papers may also include those that propose a largely untested idea or ...
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Our BatGame paper is out! This is an engaging way to introduce undergrads to the power of R and coding in biology. An interactive online game that uses simulations of hunting vampire bats to introduce students to coding Elizabeth A. Hobson, Sanjay Prasher, Gerald Carter, and Joshua Garland Advances in ...
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Thanks Mike for a nice update on activities in my lab! Full story available here UC biologist unlocks secrets of animal sociality Researcher uses prestigious grant to pursue behavioral questions By Michael Miller July 24, 2024 It’s easy for students in Elizabeth Hobson’s lab at the University of Cincinnati to get ...
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The bulk of my lab will be at the annual Animal Behavior Society conference next week. Come check out our suite of talks!! Elizabeth A. Hobson Hobson Lab PI Wed (26th) 1:30PM -- Social behavior 2 "Social support and rank dynamics in parakeet groups" Claire L. O'Connell Hobson Lab PhD ...
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Collective signalling is shaped by feedbacks between signaller variation, receiver perception and acoustic environment in a simulated communication network Michael S. Reichert, Barney Luttbeg, and Elizabeth A. HobsonPublished:20 May 2024   https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0186   Abstract Communication takes place within a network of multiple signallers and receivers. Social network analysis provides tools ...
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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.  Open access link to paper Abstract Social structure can emerge from hierarchically embedded scales of movement, where movement ...
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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. The path of complexity Laurent ...
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I will be teaching my “Analytical Tools for Behavior” course (BIOL3017) in Fall 2024. This is a beginner-friendly learn-to-code course based around animal behavior concepts and using data from penguins. There is increasing awareness that data science and computational thinking are critical skills for undergraduates to develop. The goal of ...
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We are recruiting student volunteers or work/study students to help us provide daily care to our Bobwhite quail in the lab. Students should be able to commit to a minimum of 3 hours of work per week. Duties will include changing food and water, providing health checks, and potentially assisting ...
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We are recruiting student volunteers or work/study students to help with data collection in the lab. Work with PhD student Sanjay Prasher to assist in his research on bobwhite quail sociality. Sanjay recorded hours of video of quail moving around and interacting with each other in a flight pen. We're ...
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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 Abstract: Sexual selection by mate choice is a powerful force that can lead to evolutionary change, and ...
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Grace has a new paper now out in PLOS Computational Biology! Individual identity information persists in learned calls of introduced parrot populations Grace Smith-Vidaurre , Valeria Pérez-Marrufo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Alejandro Salinas-Melgoza, Timothy F. Wright Abstract Animals can actively encode different types of identity information in learned communication signals, such ...
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Challenges and opportunities to build quantitative self-confidence in biologists  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 ...
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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.  All ...
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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! See her website for more details. Grace ...
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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, ...
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Mike Miller did a great press release for our recent paper on rank dynamics and social history in monk parakeets. Thanks Mike! See the published paper here (or access our preprint for free here) See the full press release here These birds vacation at their peril Gregarious monk parakeets lose ...
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Huge congratulations to Darby for winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!! Darby will join my lab as a PhD student in Fall 2023 and will work on merging conservation practices with animal behavior and sociality in parrots. She joins the lab after two years as a post-bac on our parakeet ...
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I am very grateful to UC for funding an internal grant proposal to support new work with our bobwhite quail.  I'll be recruiting undergrads to help with this research soon! Visit this page for information. From UC's Office of Research Press Release: (see the full version here) Congratulations Collaborative Research ...
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I am really grateful to UC for funding an internal grant that will support new social experiments with our quail system and the establishment of a brand new system where we will work on betta fish! My goal is to look at how both species respond to social perturbations and ...
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Brent Stoffer and I are working on a new initiative to incorporate data science and coding into UC's introductory biology course. We received funding from UC to start implementing these changes. See the overview of our plans in the video here I developed a module for the course in 2021 ...
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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! (Full story available here)  This bobwhite quail 'recording studio' ...
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Hobson Lab Capstone Undergraduate student Sophia Clemen just got her first research funding! She was awarded an undergraduate research fellowship to fund some of her capstone project work with "the bobs", our bobwhite quail system. Sophia will be studying their vocalizations and will be recording their "bob-white" calls in the ...
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Hobson Lab PhD Candidate Sanjay Prasher and Undergrad Capstone student Sophia Clemen both presented their research as posters at the 2022 Sensorium conference on Sensory Biology and Ecology here at the University of Cincinnati. Sanjay presented on some of his new results from an agent-based model. Sophia presented on her ...
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