Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
There are limited opportunities for a small group of students to conduct penguin behavioral observations in person at the zoo, under the supervision of Hannah Griebling (University of British Columbia).
If you are interested in this opportunity, please out your information in this form (https://forms.gle/8y3EXZQK64ofwfuK6… [Read full details]
I am currently recruiting undergraduate students interested in gaining data science and analytical skills. “Penguin Data Club” is a weekly meeting for undergrads at the University of Cincinnati. Working in collaboration with Dr. Katie Kalafut and the Cincinnati Zoo, we will dig into the social lives of Little Blue Penguins.… [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]
We were happy to hear that two new chicks have hatched into our parakeet population! We look forward to including these two new birds into our social experiments, hopefully starting in January (fieldwork is of course pending the state of the pandemic).… [Read full details]
I did a little consulting for the PBS Kids show Wild Kratts for an episode on parrots. The episode was released this summer and it was fun to see how they incorporated the science into the show!
Some of the science they profiled is from my 2017 paper with Don Brightsmith and Gustavo Martinez.… [Read full details]
My group just posted a preprint from some of our new data on social interactions in parakeets. Congratulations to the team for writing this up during a pandemic and salvaging data from our cut-very-short/cancelled field season!!
The manuscript is available on arXiv and is currently in review at Current Zoology.… [Read full details]
The first big grant for the new Hobson Lab was funded by the NSF!!
The research focuses on sociality in vampire bats across many different levels, from individuals to relationships, to network structures. The work is in collaboration with Gerry Carter and Ian Hamilton at the Ohio State University.… [Read full details]
Before Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel began working on parakeets, she did her PhD research working with squirrels. She just had a nice paper published from her work on Barbary ground squirrels.
Congratulations Annemarie!
Abstract: (From The Journal of Mammalogy)
Research on sociality in temperate ground-dwelling squirrels has focused on female philopatry and other life history trade-offs, which are influenced by constraints in the duration of the active growing season.
… [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]