We are back in Davis! The thousands of miles, the packing and unpacking, the dust and wind, are now firmly in the rearview mirror.
Our reason for getting back last week was that not one but TWO of Gail’s graduate students were giving exit seminars. The first was Jessica Yorzinski (I should say Dr. Yorzinksi- she is the first from the Patricelli Lab to complete her dissertation defense). Jessica has been working on an astounding number of projects during her time at Davis, but her focus has been on studying female gaze patterns during courtship in peafowl. She has set up and maintained a captive colony of male and female peafowl at a farm in Durham, North Carolina, and has trained the peafowl hens to wear eye-tracking headgear to monitor their eye movements when encountering males. This was definitely one of the more fearless dissertation projects I’ve ever seen, but Jessica managed to solve all manner of technical and other problems to answer the following question: when faced with such an elaborately ornamented suitor, just what do females actually look at? Jessica gave a fantastic seminar, and the beginnings of an answer to this question.
The second student was Teresa Iglesias, who presented her work on “cacophonous aggregations” in western scrub jays. Teresa noticed scrub jays would apparently alarm call when they encountered a dead jay, and other jays would come in to investigate. Teresa’s PhD involved a series of field experiments to test how jays respond to different stimuli (different sorts of dead birds, as well as predators), and also started to look what brain areas seem to be involved with these reactions. I really like Teresa’s project too- she focused on a common urban species, and was able to conducts a series of studies to explore a (probably common) but heretofore undescribed behavior that actually tells us a lot about how animals see the world. Teresa’s results suggest that scrub jays are alert to cues of risk, and that seeing a dead jay on the ground is a good sign to be vigilant or even avoid an area that may hide unseen dangers.
Congrats to Jessica and Teresa, and to Gail for launching her first graduates! You can contact them via the Grad Student Page on Gail’s website.