Gail demonstrates the robot at the Wonderlab in Bloomington, Indiana

I’ll start my recap of the Animal Behavior Society/International Ethological Congress at the end of the conference rather than the beginning. The afternoon after the final luncheon, Emilie Snell-Rood from the University of Minnesota organized a fantastic outreach event at WonderLab, a local children’s museum. This event really was a stroke of genius- the idea was to have some of the multitude of animal behavior researchers here for the conference put together a small, hands-on exhibit related to their research. We all got to wear snazzy name-tags like this:

We actually had four Patricelli Lab folks there, besides Gail and I, Conor Taff took off his Common Yellowthroat hat and helped us talk about sage-grouse, and recent undergraduate Becca Koch, who presented a poster at the meeting, also helped answer questions. Not surprisingly, the kids were most enthralled by the fembot (Gail even let them drive!), and our display was one of the more popular ones inside. Some of the parents were pretty curious as well- they had a bit more patience for the high-speed videos we showed on laptops.

The other exhibits were also really fun and some were quite creative, from feeding live spiders, marking butterflies, banding birds, describing dog emotions, and many others. A local (Bloomington) article about the program can be viewed here, and Emilie Snell-Rood also posted on her blog about the event.