Behavioral Ecology Blog

I’ve been all over the central Californian coast, looking for a nice place to trap mice. I’ve seen some pretty nice places, and see some cool things.. Here are some photos from:
 
Coyote at the Marino Reserve
 

Peromyscus californicus at the Marino Reserve. Check out all those ticks

This is the researcher housing at the Marino Reserve.. Pretty [...]

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Here are a few pics from my last research trip. I was at the Landels Big Creek Reserve. It’s 20 miles south of Big Sur, CA. A pretty amazing field site yes??? I was pretty successful, catching all 4 Central California Peromyscus species (P. maniculatus, californicus, truei, boylii). This is a photo taken from my [...]

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What have I been up to you  might ask???

Life was consumed by a period of civil service. I served on a jury- a whopping 10 weeks.  It was a murder case, one that received national press..

If its humanly possible to boil down 10 weeks of testimony to a few sentances, here it is. Manuel David [...]

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OK, so jury duty unfortunately means that I have not been keeping up on current literature.. So, this paper: Wasp Gene Expression Supports an Evolutionary Link Between Maternal Behavior and Eusociality from the 27-Sept issue of Science was missed completely…
Before I get into the paper, I want to rant for a minute about “Next generation” [...]

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Published in 1974, this paper is arguably Bob Trivers 2nd most influential paper behind the paper describing reciprocal altruism… Because very few people read long blog posts, and the idea is to introduce these ideas to people that might not already be familiar, I’l go ahead and list the main points/finding, and then go into [...]

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Are you as pumped about Just Science 2008 as I am?? I hope so, cause I expect to see some really nice, well thought out posts on science i the next few days…
I’ll have to admit that my effors will be severely hampered by Jury Duty (I’m on a jury), but we’ll see what I [...]

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this very nice study by a fellow IB grad student and associate of the MVZ published this month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society London B. It represents the bulk of the dissertation research of Chris Clark, who has studied sound production in The Anna’s Hummingbird.
As [...]

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For the practicing scientist readers. you know that feeling of excitement you get when you read a paper sometimes… That “Holy Shit, this is one of the nicest papers I’ve read in a long time” feeling.. Well hold on, cause if your interested in behavioral ecology, sexual selection, mate choice, birds, biology, ect, this paper [...]

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Roy Caldwell’s Animal Behavior class at UC Berkeley will be podcasted.. You can listen live (M-W-F 10A-11A PST) or after the fact… Click to the podcast icon to subscribe.

Here is the homepage.

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.. and sorry your dead. John Maynard-Smith was one of the major players in the formation of the modern synthesis. He applied the principals of game theory to evolutionary biology which allowed us to make quantitative predictions about outcomes… Here is a video from 2002 where he discusses the science, his life, and other things..

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