This blogpost grows out of a number of recent conversations about “science”-- what it is, how to do it, and why. Whenever my research involves truly boring, tedious things (like scoring hours of video footage), my mind starts to wander off to all kinds of such philosophical things. Y’know, big picture stuff. (Not that big … Continue reading The scientific pleasures of ignorance (and other big picture stuff)
A workshop on analyzing vocal sequences
I just returned from a 4-day NIMBioS workshop on computational analysis of animal vocal sequences. The workshop was led and organized by NIMBios PostDoc Fellow Arik Kershenbaum, prolific animal behaviorist Dan Blumstein, and bioacoustics-specialist and computer scientist Marie Roch, and included about 40 other researchers from diverse fields such as cognitive science, human speech processing, animal communication, and even philosophy. … Continue reading A workshop on analyzing vocal sequences
Sketchy science: open access is the solution, not the problem.
More and more science is becoming freely available to the public, or open access (OA). I love the movement towards OA, mainly because I like to be able to find and read papers online, even when I'm not on campus. I like being able to use the internet as my interconnected library of science articles, … Continue reading Sketchy science: open access is the solution, not the problem.
What animals will a vampire bat feed on? You might be surprised.
Recently I was talking to someone about vampire bats and described them as "super-bats" as in, super-strong, super-fast, super-smart. In this blogpost, I'm going to give just one example of this-- a vampire bat's extraordinary ability to feed on difficult and dangerous prey. Thanks to Ed Hurme for suggesting I write a blogpost about this … Continue reading What animals will a vampire bat feed on? You might be surprised.
At the 2013 Animal Behavior Meetings
I'm at the Animal Behavior Meeting in Boulder, CO. Tomorrow is the last day. The talks here have been great, especially the first hour session on vocal communication in birds. Another highlight for me was Jesse Barber's talk on hawkmoth defenses against bats. More people than I expected turned out to see my talk on … Continue reading At the 2013 Animal Behavior Meetings
Manipulating vampire bats’ social relationships: not so easy
In my opinion, reciprocity in vampire bats has not been demonstrated unambiguously. This is because all the evidence to date has really been correlational. My singular obsession recently had been trying to setup and perform the "perfect" reciprocity test in vampire bats. Vampire bats are a good candidate for this kind of experiment because they … Continue reading Manipulating vampire bats’ social relationships: not so easy
Vampire bats regurgitating food to the wrong individual
Bats often roost in absolute darkness and must recognize others through sound and smell. After watching many, many hours of infrared footage of vampire bat food sharing, I've noticed that my vampire bats sometimes appear to make brief mistakes by sharing food with the wrong individual. A typical food sharing sequence starts with the donor … Continue reading Vampire bats regurgitating food to the wrong individual
Researchers, post your work online
I just submitted an invited review of the evidence of reciprocity in vampire bat food sharing. This allowed me to get out a bunch of data from unpublished studies, most of which were negative results from groups of vampire bats that did not share food with each other. Publishing negative results is important, especially as the difficulty … Continue reading Researchers, post your work online
Chest gland of male greater spear-nosed bat (Phyllostomus hastatus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1N38p7tDa4 Unfortunately, it's slightly out of focus. Graduate student Danielle Adams shows off the chest gland of a male greater spear-nosed bat.
The story of “How I almost died in Trinidad”
A reporter from the Trinidadian press contacted me for this story. I feel like I have told it too many times. Hopefully, this will be the last time, and now I can just refer people to this blog post! First some background-- The last week of June I helped my labmate Danielle Adams with her … Continue reading The story of “How I almost died in Trinidad”
Carter Lab 