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2013 Field Crew Advertisements are now posted

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I’ve started posting the job advertisement for our field crew for the 2013 sage-grouse season. We’re looking for 4-5 experienced, motivated, easy-to-live-with assistants to help with our research next season. It should be a fun year- we will hopefully have some encounternet tags to test (next-gen telemetry tags with gps and accelerometers made by our collaborator John Burt), and also likely have multi-robot behavior experiments on the docket.

I’m posting it in the “normal” places (Texas A&M Widlife Job Board, OSNA Job board, Society for Conservation Biology, and Animal Behavior Society- stay tuned for this as they are apparently having problems with their board). There’s a new forum-type board for bird jobs on the Ornithology Exchange- I may try that as well, although it looks fairly redundant with the OSNA job board (at least for our purposes- unfortunately we  can only take US citizens or legal residents and the Ornithology Exchange features a lot of international societies).

Here’s the ad!

FIELD ASSISTANTS (4-5) needed approximately March 3 – May 5 for investigations of the behavior and ecology of Greater Sage-Grouse near Lander, Wyoming and the scenic Wind River Range.  The projects are part of a larger effort in Prof. Gail Patricelli’s lab at UC Davis to understand how sexual selection and environmental acoustics shape sage-grouse display behaviors- see the following websites for more information (http://www.eve.ucdavis.edu/gpatricelli/) and (http://www.alankrakauer.org). Assistants will use video and audio recording technology to support an NSF-funded study of courtship dynamics and display plasticity on the lek. Duties include maintaining camera and acoustic monitoring equipment, observation of basic courtship behavior and lek counts, GPS surveying, habitat characterization, assisting in the capture of adult sage-grouse, data entry, and some computer and video analysis. Assistants must be flexible in their needs and comfortable living and working in close quarters in a remote field station, and able to work in adverse field conditions (mainly MUD and COLD).  Work will be daily and primarily early in the morning, with afternoon and night work required as well.  Applicants must have a valid driver’s license, basic computer skills, and have participated in at least one field biology project in the past. Wilderness First Aid or First Responder, and previous experience/certification with off-road driving and/or ATV’s is preferred but not required. Must be able to show proof of United States employment eligibility. Assistants will receive a total stipend of $1200 plus room and board, but need to provide their own transportation to Lander and their own personal gear.  Please send a cover letter, resume, and contact info for two (2) references to: Alan Krakauer, Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, 2320 Storer Hall, Davis, CA 95616, or preferably by email to ahkrakauer [at] ucdavis.edu.  The positions will remain open until filled, and review of applications will begin immediately.

 

I’ve been pretty busy with teaching over the past month, but hope to have some more research-related updates soon.

A correction 7 years in the making

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My study of kin selection in turkeys has been used in many college classrooms across the world, and is now making its way into a number of textbooks. Given that people actually seem to be reading this paper, I’ve always regretted the glaring typo that somehow made it into the final version of the manuscript. I remember it well- sending the proof out to a few friends and colleagues to share the good news that the paper would soon be published, and Mark Hauber writing back to let me know that the inequality sign in Hamilton’s Rule was reversed (it read rB – C < 0 when it should have read rB – C > 0). I quickly fired off an email to the editors of Nature to see whether there was time to fix it, and if not, to append a correction, but at the time they did not feel the typo warranted a special correction. The paper appeared with the mistake, and for the past 7 years I’ve fielded questions about the mistake, and proactively informed colleagues about it if they contact me about the study.

Imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks ago I get an email from an editor at Nature informing me that a reader had contacted them about a typographic error in the paper, and was I aware of this! Thankfully I still had the 2005 email exchange. While there is still no formal correction, the ability to provide reader comments on archived papers now allows me to make a note about the error. I’m not sure how many people actually read the comments, but hopefully it will help. I’ll definitely leave the warning up on my publications page as well.

 

 

Upcoming MDAS talk

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Here are the details regarding my upcoming Mount Diablo Audubon Society talk. This will be at the October monthly meeting (Thursday, Oct 4) at the normal location- Camellia room at the Gardens at Heather Farms in Walnut Creek. The meeting starts at 7PM, and the seminar should start around 8. This will be a sage-grouse talk, featuring how they make sound, and some of the conservation work headed up by Jessica and Gail.

I also received a follow up email regarding my 16 November talk at CCSF. Apparently I have the option of having my talk recorded, and also having the recording broadcast on community access television. Can’t help but think about Wayne’s World now!

Scrub jay cacaphonous aggregation paper out

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A quick announcement that Patricelli lab member Teresa Iglesias’ first dissertation paper is now out in Animal Behavior. I think her project is a nice model for how a lot of science still needs to come from basic behavior and natural history observation, and also how one can do cool local, low cost field experiments (although Teresa ended up including more high-tech neurobiological component to her research as well). Teresa set out to understand why western scrub jays call loudly and recruit other jays to the site of a dead conspecific. She set up feeding stations throughout Davis, which helped get her research out to the local public, and also involved numerous undergraduates in facilitating the experiments.  Anyway, a link to the paper. Congrats Teresa.

Teresa is currently working at Woods Hole on cuttlefish behavior, which gives me an excuse to post this link.

 

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.