In just a few days I am off to Scotland for the first time in my life. Instead of a brief visit to Edinburgh for a visit to the castle and trip to buy some short bread, I am going to be spending six weeks on the Isle of Rum with almost no electricity. Why would anyone go to a remote Scottish Island for six weeks you might ask? Well the obvious answer to that question, of course, is to go an measure the cranial capacities of over 1000 red deer (Cervus elaphus) skulls (see picture to the left).
I am going with my girlfriend and we are really excited about the trip. We are working on a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. The skulls that we will be measuring are from a very well studied population of deer. Researchers have been studying red deer on rum for decades (Red Deer Project) and some of the seminal behavioural ecology papers have been produced from research carried out on these animals. We're helping out in a project investigating cranial capacity and life-history traits, which will hopefully produce some interesting results.
While we are there we get to experience an amazing Island. I am hoping to take some nice photos of the scenery and wildlife. But to be honest I am mainly excited about not having to sit behind a computer for the next month and a half. If I get the chance to put some pictures up then I'll try and put them on my blog or on flckr.

Here are some links to sites about Rum:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B9m
http://www.isleofrum.com/

Here is a very short list, by no means all encompassing, of some of the scientists whose papers I find the most fun to read. There researchers are fairly prolific and seem to take novel angles when they investigate an area of research. I have put links to their google citation pages, so you can have a look at the work they have done. By using google citation it means that I haven't got two of my favourite scientists on the list (Nick Davies and Becky Kilner), as they don't have pages. I hope that people might find some useful papers among the multitude that these researchers have written, but if not then I hope you'll find something interesting.

Richard Shine
http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=lc5qpkUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

Claire Spottiswoode
http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=NS2tSpIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

Naomi Langmore
http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=6unWrKoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

Mathias Kolliker
http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=NDd4ur8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

Nicola Saino
http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=rGGBNJgAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

There are loads more researchers whose work I think is awesome, and so I might post some links to their google citation pages by the end of the week. 

I'm doing some work currently on a chapter about parental care and so I thought I would just post a few abstracts from some of the weirder and more interesting papers that I have come across. Hopefully they are interesting and will inform you about things you didn't know about. But first here is a link to a crazy animal, the tongue-eating louse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua (crazy an weird creature, look it up on google images for some more crazy pics).

Weygoldt (1980) Complex brood care and reproductive behaviour in captive poison-arrow frogs, Dendrobates pumilio O. Schmidt. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol., 7:329-332
Brood care in Dendrobates pumilio not only involves egg attendance and tadpole transport, but also tadpole attendance and feeding. Each tadpole is carried by the attending female to a water-filled bromelial leaf axil and regularly fed on unfertilized eggs. The tadpole responds to an approaching adult with a specialized, conspicuous behavior signalling its presence. Male-male competition includes fighting, egg eating, and male tadpole transport. D. pumilio is the first frog known to feed its free-living larvae.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00300674#page-1


Shaffer & Formanowicz Jr (1996) A cost of viviparity and parental care in scorpions: reduced sprint speed and behavioural compensation. Animal Behaviour, 51:1017-1024
Current reproductive effort may often be at the expense of future reproduction. One way in which future reproduction of viviparous animals may be affected is by increased risk of predation resulting from decreased mobility associated with pregnancy. The common striped scorpion,Centruroides vittatus, may experience considerable risk of predation associated with reproduction because it is viviparous, with an eight-month gestation period.C. vittatusalso carries the newborn young on its back during their first instar. The purpose of this study was to establish a cost of viviparity and parental care in these scorpions by determining sprint speed at three reproductive stages: pregnant, carrying offspring and post-dispersal of offspring. Post-dispersal speed was used as a best estimate of non-pregnant speed. Pregnant speeds averaged 84% of post-dispersal speeds. Lower speeds were correlated with absolute and relative measures of litter size. Speed while carrying offspring averaged 61% of post-dispersal speed, and was correlated with mass of the litter and number of individuals in the litter. Sixty-five per cent of the females carrying young could not be induced to run; these females instead assumed a defensive posture. Results indicate that female scorpions experience a cost (in decreased running speed) to viviparity and parental care, and that some females may reduce this cost by using an alternative defensive strategy.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347296901049


Hayward, Mar, Lahdenperä & Lummaa (2014) Early reproductive investment, senescence and lifetime reproductive success in female Asian elephants. Journal of Evolutionary Biology (IN PRESS)
The evolutionary theory of senescence posits that as the probability of extrinsic mortality increases with age, selection should favour early-life over late-life reproduction. Studies on natural vertebrate populations show early reproduction may impair later-life performance, but the consequences for lifetime fitness have rarely been determined, and little is known of whether similar patterns apply to mammals which typically live for several decades. We used a longitudinal dataset on Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to investigate associations between early-life reproduction and female age-specific survival, fecundity and offspring survival to independence, as well as lifetime breeding success (lifetime number of calves produced). Females showed low fecundity following sexual maturity, followed by a rapid increase to a peak at age 19 and a subsequent decline. High early life reproductive output (before the peak of performance) was positively associated with subsequent age-specific fecundity and offspring survival, but significantly impaired a female's own later-life survival. Despite the negative effects of early reproduction on late-life survival, early reproduction is under positive selection through a positive association with lifetime breeding success. Our results suggest a trade-off between early reproduction and later survival which is maintained by strong selection for high early fecundity, and thus support the prediction from life history theory that high investment in reproductive success in early life is favoured by selection through lifetime fitness despite costs to later-life survival. That maternal survival in elephants depends on previous reproductive investment also has implications for the success of (semi-)captive breeding programmes of this endangered species.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12350/full

Mas, Haynes & Kölliker (2009) A chemical signal of offspring quality affects maternal care in a social insect. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B., 276:2847-2853
Begging signals of offspring are condition-dependent cues that are usually predicted to display information about the short-term need (i.e. hunger) to which parents respond by allocating more food. However, recent models and experiments have revealed that parents, depending on the species and context, may respond to signals of quality (i.e. offspring reproductive value) rather than need. Despite the critical importance of this distinction for life history and conflict resolution theory, there is still limited knowledge of alternative functions of offspring signals. In this study, we investigated the communication between offspring and caring females of the common earwig,Forficula auricularia, hypothesizing that offspring chemical cues display information about nutritional condition to which females respond in terms of maternal food provisioning. Consistent with the prediction for a signal of quality we found that mothers exposed to chemical cues from well-fed nymphs foraged significantly more and allocated food to more nymphs compared with females exposed to solvent (control) or chemical cues from poorly fed nymphs. Chemical analysis revealed significant differences in the relative quantities of specific cuticular hydrocarbon compounds between treatments. To our knowledge, this study demonstrates for the first time that an offspring chemical signal reflects nutritional quality and influences maternal care.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1668/2847.short


I love the Surinam toad, it has such a weird reproductive biology. The eggs are laid on the female's back and then implant themselves into her skin. The baby toads then pop out of the females skins, crazy.

Rabb & Snedigar (1960) Observations on Breeding and Development of the Surinam Toad, Pipa pipa. Copeia, 1:40-44
Quote:
“Unfortunately we did not see the actual deposition of eggs. Bartlett (1896) reported that an evagination of the cloaca is used to conduct the eggs onto the female's back. The figure he furnished of this "ovipositor" was drawn from a specimen that had died while laying, and the structure illustrated was probably pathological. Barlett's specimen is not extant, although it was sent to Boulenger for examination (Sclater, 1896). We wish to thank Alice G. C. Grandison, who kindly searched for it at the British Museum and the Zoological Society of London.”
“The young were noticeably active on, but it was not until day 77 th young emerged. The only previous incubation period, 82 days, seems to the report of Fermin (1765). The second emergence was: day 77, three; 90, one; 120, one; 134, one; 135, four; nine. Of these 20 live young, three (including the only grossly abnormal one) died within 10 days after emerging. Partial shedding by the female took place at the onset of the last emergences (day 134).”
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1439843

Since the recession there have been large cuts in funding for science. These cuts have made it more difficult for young scientist to get post docs (due to their reduced number) and funding to continue in science. This has the potential to be good, separating the wheat from the chaff. However, it may not be so simple, as funding bodies may be 'targeting applied research areas' or 'only funding critical research'. If your area of research falls outside of these remits then no matter how excellent you are, you are going to find life very tough indeed. As a behavioural ecologist, I often have to justify my research to friends and family (however, I have yet to meet a hedge fund manager who has had to do the same) and I can understand why purely behavioural research may seem pointless. But science has shown time and time again that great breakthroughs and new insights seldom come from expected places. That said, with the majority of research funding coming from the government or universities themselves, this week has shown up how this system is failing: an assessment of an expensive and much criticized (long before it ever stared) government funded cull, and the revelation of how much the heads of universities get paid and the increase they received. The links to these two articles are pasted below. I know that in the grand scheme of science that these figures may not be huge but it just highlights how research funding is suffering even when there may be money around to be spent on it.


(I will take the point that some research was done on the badger cull, but from what I have read it seems to have been a poorly organised affair and much of the interesting and useful data was not even collected)


Ineffective and inhumane cull:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26369306

The new fat cats
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/03/new-breed-fat-cats-university-boss-vice-chancellors

Male fiddler crabs have an enlarger claw that they use in sexual displays to attract females and in assessing competing males. There have been some really cool studies done on Uca mjoebergi by Backwell and Jennions (and a load of other researchers too). These interesting crustaceans have lent themselves well to field experiments through the use of 'Robo-crab',  a robot that the researchers have been able to use to investigate female preferences and male behaviours. Below are some abstracts from some of their work and links to the papers themselves.

Callander, Hayes, Jennions & Backwell (2013) Experimental evidence that immediate neighbors affect male attractiveness. Behavioral Ecology, 24:730-733 
If female mate choice is based on comparison of locally available mates rather than absolute, fixed criteria, a male’s attractiveness might depend on the attractiveness of his immediate competitors. We use robotic models to test whether the number of females that a male fiddler crab, Uca mjoebergi, attracts depends on his immediate neighbors’ size. Larger males are, on average, more attractive to females and are also more likely to win male–male fights. Larger males can partially influence who their territorial neighbors are because they assist smaller neighbors to repel intruders that attempt to acquire the neighbor’s burrow (defence coalitions). This assistance might allow a male to avoid the costs of renegotiating territorial boundaries with new neighbors, who will also tend to be larger than the previous neighbor. In this study, we show that males are more likely to attract females if they court immediately alongside smaller males. This represents an additional potential benefit of defence coalitions, by ensuring that large males compete against smaller neighbors when courting.

http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/3/730.short


Lailvaux, Reaney & Backwell (2009) Dishonest signalling of fighting ability and multiple performance traits in the fiddler crab Uca mjoebergi. Functional Ecology, 23:359-366
1. Signals used during male combat are expected to be honest indicators of fighting ability. However, recent studies show that dishonesty in male signalling is more prevalent than previously believed.
2. Here we show that regenerated (leptochelous) claws in male Uca mjoebergi fiddler crabs are not only dishonest signals of two types of whole-organism performance capacities that are likely to be useful during fights (claw closing force and pull-resisting force), but they are also less effective as weapons in situations where males are unable to bluff.
3. Original (brachychelous) male claws are statistically significant predictors (independent of body size) of both closing force and the force required to pull a male out of a tunnel. By contrast, leptochelous claw size does not convey information on those performance capacities following control for body size.
4. Furthermore, claw size affects fighting ability such that leptochelous residents are at a significant competitive disadvantage to brachychelous residents, although claw type does not affect the ability of non-resident males to win fights.
5. This study is among the first to show that male armaments can dishonestly signal performance traits that are likely important for winning fights, and is the first to show evidence for dishonest signalling of multiple components of fighting ability.


http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2008.01501.x/full