PhD student Imran Razik was awarded both a Short-term Fellowship from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a Student Research Grant from the Animal Behavior Society. He will be studying urinary oxytocin as a predictor of variation in grooming and food-sharing between both old (familiar) and new (unfamiliar) individuals.
MSc student Bridget Brown was awarded a Critical Difference to Women Scholarship. She used this money to fund her travel to Panama where she is studying possible chemical cues for roost-finding in bats.
This summer, PhD Student Theresa Chen will be working with Michael Taborsky at the University of Bern, Switzerland, working on information used by rats to make decisions to cooperate.
Imran, Bridget, and Gerry will be at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. We will be working with Simon Ripperger, Sebastian Stockmaier, Hanna Weiser, and Rachel Page on vampire bat social networks.
The work of two of our past interns, Jineth Berrío-Martínez and Sam Kaiser, entitled The role of past experience in the development of feeding behavior in common vampire bats was recently accepted with minor revisions in the journal PeerJ.
I recently published a paper entitled Challenges with assessing the roles of nepotism and reciprocity in cooperation networks in the journal Animal Behavior. I should maybe write a separate post about that when I have time…
Rachelle Adams and I are now co-teaching the field course Tropical Behavioral Ecology and Evolution in Panama. I am going to learn a lot about ants!
A few other recent and relevant articles:
Jerry Wilkinson and Danielle Adams recently published an interesting paper on Recurrent evolution of extreme longevity in bats
Observing grooming promotes affiliation in Barbary macaques
Evidence for reconciliation between males and females in wild chacma baboons
A recent paper on the seed dispersal services provided by African fruit bats
On the evolution of human food sharing behavior norms
Popular article in American Scientist on work by Daniel Streicker’s group: Glow-in-the-Dark Vampire Bats Could Help Curtail Rabies
Carter Lab 