Tag Archives: lab updates

NSF grant in, NAOC poster done

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A brief mid-summer update- it has been a busy few weeks after getting back from my Wyoming/Colorado trip at the beginning of July. Aside from the usual manuscript reviews and progress on our own manuscripts, a couple of noteworthy things to check off:

Gail, Anna, and I submitted our latest NSF grant that would fund another 3 years of work on the sage-grouse. We brought on another collaborator: Jennifer Forbey is a professor at Boise State University in Idaho, and is an expert in herbivore/plant dynamics, particularly the importance of nutritional content and plant-produced toxins. With Jennifer on board, we will have a much stronger foraging component to our examination of off-lek behaviors of the grouse (in other words, what they are doing the other 20 hours of the day when they are not courting and fighting on the lek ). I feel like I usually do after writing one of these: exhausted but excited.

I also just finished making a poster for the North American Ornithological Congress meeting next week in Vancouver. I’ll be presenting some new analyses on the lateralization in behavior. Last year I presented on a similar topic at the Animal Behavior meetings, but I didn’t have much time to put together something (I was originally going to present our mechanical sound (i.e. “swish” project), but Becca was able to present this work herself, so I switched to the lateral bias analysis at the moment. This year it was still a rush, but I think we ended up with analyses that better link the existing literature on lateral biases to our own data, and hopefully have results that are pretty close to what will end up in the eventual publications.

The second Summer Session started this week in Davis, so I’m meeting with a few new prospective undergraduate researchers. We’ve made a lot of progress so far this summer- we’ve almost finished measuring mating success from our 2012 Chugwater Lek tapes and have started the Monument Lek mating success tapes. Marty, our summer program intern, has even gotten into the 2012 robot experiment tapes. It’s never good practice to get too excited over preliminary results from partially-collected data, but it does look really encouraging so far (his data look at whether males treated the “coy/disinterested” and “interested” behaviors of the fembot differently). We are also almost done with a sample of display behavior measures from the 2011 season- this will add to our understanding of males who were tested in the “environmental responsiveness” playback experiment in 2011.

Noise Experiment Paper Finally Out!

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At long last (~18months after first submission), Jessica’s paper detailing the multi-year noise introduction experiment has finally been published. Those with institutional access to Conservation Biology can get it here. The paper compares maximum lek attendance of males and females at leks with and without experimentally introduced noise, and found that relatively modest and localized noise sources were enough to cause declines. Two types of noise were used- relatively constant drilling noise, and less predictable truck noise. Somewhat surprisingly, truck noise, although it was intermittent and had a much lower mean amplitude over long periods, was associated with higher declines than the drilling noise.

Having seen the truly Herculean effort it took Diane and Jessica to actually execute this study in the field, and knowing how important it is to have this paper out there while new sage-grouse management plans are being drafted, I’m super excited to see this finally in print. Congrats Jessica, Diane, and Gail!

Undergraduate Mentorship Award

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Congratulations goes out to our fearless leader Gail Patricelli for receiving the 2012 Chancellor’s Award for Undergraduate Mentorship! By extension, congrats to grad students Teresa, Jessica, Jessica, Jen, Conor, Anna, and Melissa for helping support such large numbers of high quality undergraduate research projects over the past few years. I may just take a bow as well, as I’ve had a role in recruiting, training, and supervising a number of these students.

Welcome Alejandro

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Vermilion Flycatcher

Vermilion Flycatcher

Last month the Patricelli Lab gained a new member- welcome Alejandro Rios-Chelen. Alejandro is a postdoc who did his PhD and a previous postdoc at UNAM in Mexico City. His earlier work includes studies of one of my favorite birds, the Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus). He has looked at various aspects of song plasticity in this species, and in yesterday’s lab meeting took the opportunity to tell us about a study on the effects of urban noise on flycatcher song. It was a really elegant project- investigating variation both within males and between males in song characteristics such as number of song elements and frequency measures- and using simultaneous measures of background noise to help explain this variation. If I had a time machine, I think I would reconsider how we collected data in our meadowlark project.

Alejandro will likely be studying signalling behavior in local songbirds using Gail’s ring array. Welcome Alejandro!

Some Year-end Updates

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I’m sure the blog doesn’t look any different on your end, but it does on mine, since I’m now typing on a new 13” Macbook Pro! My old laptop had served me pretty well for about 4 years, which I guess is about their typical lifespan. The old one still works more or less (sometimes more, sometimes less), but I decided to be proactive about getting the new model so I didn’t have to deal with a dead computer somewhere particularly inconvenient, like, for example, a trailer in Wyoming.

I’ve also moved forward with hosting for my website. I’m going to wait until I’ve got something up before I pass on the url, but it will be through LMI.net (the great local ISP in Berkeley). I’m also going to be tackling WordPress. Ideally I will have at least some of it ready to go by the time we head to the field. I think a likely scenario might be to shift the blog portion over to WordPress and wait on the static parts until after I get to the field. Those might benefit from some re-working rather than a wholesale copy-paste job, both in terms of the content as well as potentially distributing some of the media files to other hosts (e.g. linking all the videos to Youtube).

We had a great quarter in the lab. Lots of great students working on a few different projects, and it feels like we actually got some stuff done! We’ve made good progress on the analysis of our alarm call playback experiment. Preacher Lek is finished, and the Monument Lek data are coming in rapidly in spite of the challenge of having to work with data from a camera on the hill and a camera located in the playback blind diagonally behind the lek. Definitely requires some mental gymnastics to sort those out.

Most students were working on the female approach project. With our former student/current technician Becca, we wrapped up the female position data for one of the peak breeding days in 2007, which should complete our male strut rate data for that season. We have two remaining days from 2008 and one from 2006 that are in the finishing stages. Michelle, Tawny, and some others have been working on completing the lateralization dataset. That is really close to being done as well. And Becca has finished data collection on the mechanical sounds project. Cool! Now we just have to analyze these great datasets and write up (is that all?)