Category: News

Lauren wrote a guest blog post for Science Literacy Week for Telus World of Science Edmonton: https://telusworldofscienceedmonton.ca/learn/why-i-became-psychologist-who-studies-animals/

On her new first-authored paper in Behavioral Ecology which has been receiving lots of media attention! More about Alexis here: http://www.alexisbreen.com/  Media found here. Find the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araa027

Congrats to Andrés Camacho for an Honourable Mention in the 2020 Images of Research competition at the University of Alberta! Andrés submission is entitled Animal Architecture and the accompanying information is as follows:

Animal Architecture
How does a beaver build its dam, honey bees their hive, or a bird its nest? We know of many examples of animal architecture occurring in nature, but we understand very little about how animals know what structure to build and how to build it. Much like we can assign certain buildings or structures to the artist or architect who created them, examining the design of different bird nests allows us to detect whether individual birds have unique building styles. Thus, I aim to determine how birds develop their nest-building behaviour by investigating whether different individuals of the same species have different building styles. More specifically, I study the role that learning and genetics play in nest building, a behaviour traditionally considered purely instinctual. The nests in this image were built by five different zebra finch males, the nest builder in this bird species. Each column shows two nests built by the same male, one using pink string and another using orange string. By looking at the picture, would you say each bird has his own style?

Congrats to Connor Lambert for being awarded an Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship This scholarship recognizes outstanding academic achievement of students pursuing graduate studies in Alberta. It was established to incent the best and the brightest students, including international students, to study in Alberta. Read more about Connors work on his website: https://ctlambert.weebly.com/

Congrats to first author Connor Lambert on his first paper from his PhD! Download the paper here: http://bit.ly/2OozaSL

Check out this new commentary by Elene Haave-Audet, me, and Kim Mathot in Journal of Evolutionary Biology

The ACRG sadly says goodbye to Cora-Lee Kashuba and Brittany Perkins who spent six-weeks in the laboratory as WISEST Summer Research Project students. Tristan did an excellent job serving as the primary supervisor. I’m very proud of everyone in my team. What a wonderful experience. Pictures below are from the WISEST Celebration of Research where both Brittany and Cora-Lee presented research posters.

The Animal Cognition Research Group turns 1 on Canada Day. We’ve come a long way – from zero to zebbies (building nests) in less than a year. We are currently three graduate students strong (Andrés Camacho, Tristan Eckersley, Connor Lambert) with another starting in Autumn 2019 (Gopika Balasubramanian). We also have two WISEST high school students joining us this summer: Cora-Lee Kashuba and Brittany Perkins. Check out our People page for details and pictures below to see our work space!

Lauren recently organized the 26th International Conference on Comparative Cognition, hosted, as always, in Melbourne, Florida, USA. Lauren also gave a talk on her recently published meta-analysis (with co-atuhor Liam Dougherty) and participated as a mentor in a ‘Meet the Experts’ session, the goal of which was to interact and answer questions from graduate and undergraduate students attending the conference.

Jennifer Vonk visited and gave an inspired Keynote address at the Royce-Harder Conference. Connor, Andres, and Tristan gave talks on work they conducted during their MSc’s and Undergrad at Miam U (Ohio), University of Costa Rica, and MacEwan University, respectively. Congrats to Tristan who for being awarded the best grad student talk at the conference!