Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
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]
This paper came out of a working group meeting at NIMBioS in fall 2019 called “Null models for social behavior“. This was a great working group, a really fantastic team, and a fun writing experience. The preprint is available on arXiv.… [Read full details]
I posted an update to my paper on aggression heuristics, written with Dan Mønster and Simon DeDeo. The preprint is available on arXiv here.
Members of a social species need to make appropriate decisions about who, how, and when to interact with others in their group.… [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]
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]
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]