Author Archives: alan_k

How the syrinx got its name

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Some of my work on sage-grouse has focused on how they make sound. In particular, we described a previously unknown “two-voice” phenomenon during the male courtship display, which led us to examine the vocal tract anatomy of the sage-grouse. We found that the form and musculature of the syrinx, the avian equivalent of the larynx, was much different than we expected based on what had been described for domestic chickens. In spite of this work on the syrinx, I didn’t know how this organ got its name. Well, now I know! A Golden Gate Audubon Society blog post by Burr Heneman details the greek myth and the wood nymph named Syrinx.

NAOC 2012 Recap

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View from UBC

I’m back from Vancouver and the great joint meeting of many ornithological societies. Although there were a few issues, it was, all in all, a great meeting. The venue was beautiful; the University of British Columbia is perched on the end of a peninsula, with stunning views of water, mountains, and downtown Vancouver. The weather was pretty incredible as well: sunny and warm for most of the conference.

 

We had a packed schedule for the four-day meeting. We started at 8:30 with plenary talks from well-known biologists. In the opening plenary, Fiona Schmiegelow gave an overview of research on boreal songbird conservation. Unfortunately I missed the second plenary by Irby Lovette, but the last two were excellent: Roxanna Torres from UNAM led us through 20 years of research on color signaling in Blue-footed Boobies, and Peter Marra from the Smithsonian gave an impassioned plea for the importance of studying winter behavior in migrant birds, and the importance of linking breeding, migration, and wintering ecology.

The talks were all really high quality, not like it was 15 years ago when people were still transitioning into Powerpoint and presentations were still a mix of slides, overheads, and computer. There were 10(!) concurrent sessions, so at times it was a hard choice of which talk to attend. I think the ISBE meetings in Sweden drew away some of the bird song and behavior people. That said, I still saw a number of great talks on sexual selection, bird song, noise impacts, acoustic monitoring, genomics, life history trade-offs, color, and a number of other topics. Sometimes the most unusual talks are the ones that are most memorable- in this case I might give the award to the talk by Mu-Chun Yao (National Tawain University) on how the endangered Fairy Pitta uses monkey poo as a predator deterrent on its nest.

At 5PM, the talks ended and the poster sessions began. The room was fairly spacious for two hundred posters and hundreds of presenters and browsers, although some nights it was on the warm side. I felt pretty good about the response to our poster on lateral biases in sage-grouse behaviors- I was talking to people about it for the entire session on both nights my poster was up. I was hoping someone who specialized in brain asymmetry or behavioral lateralization might stop by to offer criticism or advice on publishing, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. It’s really hard to see every poster even when you aren’t standing their explaining your own, so I’m not terribly surprised.

A real highlight of the meeting was the Bird Band Jam- basically a concert at a local bar featuring several talented musicians from the conference.  I missed the first act, but caught a solo guitarist singing comical songs about birds and birding, then a wonderful sequence of bluegrass/Americana tunes that started with one group and slowly morphed over the course of several songs into another group. The night was capped by a more contemporary rock band that certainly got an A for effort. This was the first time I’ve seen this at a bird meeting (I know Ecological Society of America has something similar), and I think the consensus was to repeat this event in the future.

Closing Banquet in the Anthropology Museum

Meetings are always a good place to start up collaborations, and this one seemed particularly fruitful. I don’t know that I have anything to report right now but hopefully my conversations may have sparked a few projects that I will report on once they get a little closer to being concrete.

 

 

 

Meetings are also a good chance to catch up with old friends. I was pleased to run into four of my former sage-grouse assistants, including Conor Taff (now in our lab), Megan Jones (Florida State), Eli Rose (N.C. State), and the biggest blast from the past Jennifer Sheppard (U. Saskatchewan). I hadn’t seen Jenn since 2006 when she was part of our very first field crew in Wyoming. At that time she hadn’t even completed her undergraduate degree, so it was great to see her doing great work as a full fledged graduate student! I also got to see several former Acorn Woodpecker and Western Bluebird assistants from Hastings. Danika Kleiber is now in graduate school at UBC, and took Sarah Knutie, Lauryn Benedict and I to a waterfowl park south of Vancouver. We enjoyed getting EXTREMELY close looks at some neat birds like Cackling Goose and Sandhill Crane, which clearly warranted a celebratory fresh blueberry smoothie from a blueberry farm on the way back to Vancouver.

And again, congrats to Conor and Jim for their awards!

NAOC 2012: Congrats Conor and Jim!

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I’m back from the NAOC 2012 meeting in Vancouver. More on the meeting in the next post. I just want to highlight the accomplishments of 2 good friends of mine. First, my former grouse watcher and current lab-mate Conor Taff won one of the student presentation awards for his talk on the effects of breeding density on sexual selection in Common Yellowthroats. Conor gave a really impressive talk based on a great analysis of the parentage data from the yellowthroat population he has been working on for a number of years.

Second, congrats to Jim Rivers for receiving the American Ornithologists’ Union Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award. This is a relatively new award, set up in honor of Ned Johnson who was on my dissertation committee at Berkeley before passing away. Very happy my friend Jim was honored with this award- Jim has always been a great scientist, and it’s great that he was also recognized for all the work he’s done to get young ornithologists to feel welcome in the AOU. Jim has always been a force of nature at these conferences.

I haven’t found any grand repository for all the awards given across all the societies during this joint meeting, so I’m sure I am missing other noteworthy honors.

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.

CCSF Talk in November

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Besides teaching Intro to Evolution for the first time, I will have a few other things on my plate for this fall. The first one that’s actually been scheduled is a talk at City College of San Francisco. The CCSF Department of Biology has a long-running seminar series that is open to the public (note the fall schedule is not yet posted). The talk will be November 16, and I’ll be talking about wild turkeys instead of sage-grouse for a change. Appropriate for the week before Thanksgiving I guess!

I am hoping to arrange a local Audubon Society talk as well- I’ll post more about that as soon as I have any details. And my former colleagues at Berkeley (Sam Diaz-Muñoz, Emily DuVal, and Eileen Lacey) are threatening to write a review paper, and in the Patricelli Lab we will continue to forward on a number of sage-grouse projects. It should be enough to keep me busy!