Studying social structure and the evolution of sociality
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
Sexual selection by mate choice is a powerful force that can lead to evolutionary change, and models of why females choose particular mates are central to understanding its effects.… [Read full details]
Grace has a new paper now out in PLOS Computational Biology!
Grace Smith-Vidaurre , Valeria Pérez-Marrufo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Alejandro Salinas-Melgoza, Timothy F. Wright
Animals can actively encode different types of identity information in learned communication signals, such as group membership or individual identity.… [Read full details]
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 R White
This paper came out of a NIMBioS workshop called “Quantitative Education in Life Science Graduate Programs“
New graduate students in biology programs may lack the quantitative skills necessary for their research and professional careers.… [Read full details]
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. … [Read full details]
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!… [Read full details]
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, but we really wanted to conduct experimental manipulations to test it in action.… [Read full details]
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 which was based around using automated tracking data from penguins at the Cincinnati Zoo.… [Read full details]