Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
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]
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.… [Read full details]
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. … [Read full details]
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.… [Read full details]
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.
Dominance hierarchies direct and structure aggression in a myriad of species.… [Read full details]
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 currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley).… [Read full details]
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 do you perform an ultrasound on a hippopotamus?
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.… [Read full details]
New work, led by Cesar Estien, is now posted as a preprint!
Cesar Omar Estien, Claire L. O’Connell, Xavier Francis, Grace Smith-Vidaurre, Bryan M. Kluever, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Anne Marie van der Marel
Human-wildlife interactions continue to increase due to anthropogenic disturbances, with some interactions resulting in conflict.… [Read full details]
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 … [Read full details]