Traplining
Hummingbirds forage by revisiting flowers and it is thought that they do so by following routes or sequences that are repeated through time (traplines). To determine if this is in fact the case, Maria recorded the…
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Risk Sensitivity
Animals will often base their decision about where to forage on how variable a resource is as well as the size of the mean reward they can get from it. This is know as risk sensitive foraging. In the image below, a…
Sex differences in spatial memory
In nature, morphological and behavioral differences among sexes are readily identified, with the exception of cognitive abilities. While the possibility that the sexes differ in their cognition (learning and memory) is…
Spatial vs. Colour cues
In some species, males use spatial cues (distance and direction) and feature cues (a colour or a landmark) to relocate a reward while females only use a feature cues. Maria tested whether female hummingbirds of three…
Spatial navigation in hummingbirds
To test spatial memory, David Pritchard taught hummingbirds to feed from an artificial flower positioned between two landmarks. He then removed the flower and watched to see where each hummingbird searched for it,…
Sunbird fieldwork commences
Ida Bailey is flying to Pretoria, South Africa, to help initiate a research project investigating how flower morphology influences the foraging decision of sunbirds. The research is being conducted in collaboration…
International Conference on Comparative Cognition (CO3)
Lauren Guillette gave a talk at the 22nd International Conference on Comparative Cognition about social learning in nest-building zebra finches. Lauren was also a mentor during a post-graduate prep session aimed at…
Scottish Conference on Animal Behaviour
The Scottish Conference of Animal Behaviour (SCAB) was located in our home university, St Andrews, this year and was quite well attended; everyone in the lab went. Individuals from our lab presented 4 different talks,…
The BBSRC is promoting our nest construction research
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Easter ASAB
This year’s Easter conference for the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) was held at Durham University, hosted by the Behaviour Ecology and Evolution Research (BEER) Centre. Three members of the Healy…