News

New preprint is available on ecoevorxiv here! With gorgeous art by V. Darby Moore. We used data on 12 species of parrots who form mixed species groups to eat clay from exposed cliffs along rivers in Peru to determine the simplest methods each species could be using to make co-occurrence ...
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New paper, led by Allison Roth!! See the full text here at Behavioral Ecology Abstract 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 ...
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2022 22 Sept Liz will be giving a seminar talk at McMaster University's Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, invited by Reuven Dukas 27 Sept Liz will be giving a seminar talk at Texas A&M University's Biology Department, invited by Courtney Fitzpatrick ...
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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 ...
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Julie Barnes: "A Big Data Approach to Studying Feline Welfare in Shelters " My first graduate student, Julie Barnes, finished her Masters project this summer and graduated! Julie did a great job on her project, which integrated aspects of animal welfare with big data and technology. Julie started her project ...
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I was really excited to be awarded the University of Cincinnati "Forward Faculty" award for Transformational Experiential Learning this year. This award is for my learn-to-code course for undergraduates which introduces them to coding in R using topics in Animal Behavior and data from the Cincinnati Zoo's penguins.  To read ...
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With Marcela Benítez, I co-organized a symposium at the Animal Behavior Conference focused on Social Competency. We had a great mix of speakers, with some longer keynote talks, regular research talks, and several short lightning talks all centered on work touching on ideas of social competency in animals.   Here ...
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We were very excited to travel to Costa Rica this summer for the 2022 Animal Behavior Conference. In all, Hobson Lab members presented 8 talks (all within the Social Competency Symposium) and a poster. Whew! Here is an overview of everyone's presentations: Liz Hobson: Co-organized and co-moderated the Social Competency ...
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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. Abstract Dominance hierarchies direct and structure aggression in a myriad ...
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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 ...
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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 to give a hippo an ultrasound UC biology ...
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Led by Anshuman Swain and with co-authors Sara Williams and Louisa Di Felice, we have a new paper out now in Animal Behaviour! We used an existing dataset to dig into the previously unexplained noise surrounding task switching in an ant species. This paper started as a collaborative project at ...
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New work, led by Cesar Estien, is now posted as a preprint! Authors Cesar Omar Estien, Claire L. O'Connell, Xavier Francis, Grace Smith-Vidaurre, Bryan M. Kluever, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Anne Marie van der Marel Abstract Human-wildlife interactions continue to increase due to anthropogenic disturbances, with some interactions resulting in conflict. Leveraging a ...
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I was really excited to give a seminar to the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, & Culture Speaker Series. The talk was recorded and is available here: https://youtu.be/malhns2KGvw ...
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I was really excited to be a guest on the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast.  Listen to the episode here: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/78  Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies FEBRUARY 24TH, 2022 | 01:13:37 | E78 EPISODE NOTESIrrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order ...
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Mike Miller with UC Press wrote a nice overview of our new special issue on dominance hierarchies, published earlier this week. Link to the article: https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2022/01/pecking-order--uc-biologist-explains-100-years-of-dominance-hierarchies.html Unlocking the mysteries of the pecking order UC biologist discusses 100 years of research in dominance hierarchies By Michael Miller Dominance hierarchies were first ...
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Eli Strauss, Dai Shizuka, James Curley, and I recently co-edited a special issue all about dominance hierarchies. For the issue, Eli led a new paper that compiles datasets on over 100 species for which dominance data have been published. Our team also built an R package to more easily manage ...
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For the new special issue I co-edited with Eli Strauss, Dai Shizuka, and James Curley on dominance hierarchy research, I wrote a fun paper about the dynamics of publications in nearly 100 years of research. I used a science of science approach to take a bird's eye view of publication ...
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Eli Strauss, Dai Shizuka, James Curley, and I recently co-edited a special issue all about dominance hierarchies. It was just published in Phil Trans B. Eli led a nice introduction to the issue that integrates some classic quotes and thinking about dominance hierarchies with modern approaches to highlight new insights ...
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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. Dates Fieldwork will start in the beginning of Feb 2022 and end by early June. Field assistants should be ...
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Mike Miller wrote a nice press release of Annemarie's new paper! Paper available here    This squirrel watches its neighbor's back Barbary ground squirrels look for predators together as a survival strategy By Michael Miller Email Michael October 28, 2021   Just because you're paranoid, that doesn’t mean everything isn’t ...
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Annemarie's new paper on ground squirrels was profiled in the Billings Gazette, who also made a cute comic describing her work. Paper available here | UC's press release on the paper | Coverage & comic here Ground squirrels use neighborhood watch to stay safe Brett French It could be hard to ...
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I am really excited for this year's Animal Behavior meeting! Our lab has a great showing this year with a set of very diverse talks/posters.         ...
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A summary of one of my recent papers was just published. This work, led by Don Brightsmith, could provide important insight into the movements, ecology, and conservation of large macaws. See the paper here: http://www.ace-eco.org/vol16/iss1/art14/, and the link to the summary here. New System For Tracking Macaws Emphasizes Species’ Conservation ...
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I published a new preprint called "Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy research". In it, I take a science of science approach (along with text mining and network methods) to get a bird's eye view of patterns of publication rates, term usage, and term co-occurrences over ...
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