So after finishing my PhD I went back the kalahari to help Tom Flower out with some cool work investigating deception tactics and learning in fork-tailed drongos. While I was there I also had a chance to help his honours student, Bruce, out with his research investigating the relationship between drongos and sociable weavers. The kalahari is full of cool inter-species interactions (I'll put a couple of papers below). Bruce's work has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, I have put the abstract and a link to the paper below. The work was really fun to do and highlights how conflict and cooperation have to coexist in both and ecological and evolutionary setting, and that this can lead to cool things evolving.

Baigrie, Thompson & Flower (2014) Interspecific signalling between mutualists: food-thieving drongos use a cooperative sentinel call to manipulate foraging partners. Proc R Soc, 281:20141232
Interspecific communication is common in nature, particularly between mutualists. However, whether signals evolved for communication with other species, or are in fact conspecific signals eavesdropped upon by partners, is often unclear. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) associate with mixed-species groups and often produce true alarms at predators, whereupon associating species flee to cover, but also false alarms to steal associating species' food (kleptoparasitism). Despite such deception, associating species respond to drongo non-alarm calls by increasing their foraging and decreasing vigilance. Yet, whether these calls represent interspecific sentinel signals remains unknown. We show that drongos produced a specific sentinel call when foraging with a common associate, the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), but not when alone. Weavers increased their foraging and decreased vigilance when naturally associating with drongos, and in response to sentinel call playback. Further, drongos sentinel-called more often when weavers were moving, and weavers approached sentinel calls, suggesting a recruitment function. Finally, drongos sentinel-called when weavers fled following false alarms, thereby reducing disruption to weaver foraging time. Results therefore provide evidence of an ‘all clear’ signal that mitigates the cost of inaccurate communication. Our results suggest that drongos enhance exploitation of a foraging mutualist through coevolution of interspecific sentinel signals.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.abstract

Other cool interspecies interactions:

Pied babblers and scimitarbills:
Ridley, Wiley & Thompson (2014) The ecological benefits of interceptive eavesdropping. Functional Ecology, 28: 197-205

Drongos and pied babblers:Flower (2011) Fork-tailed drongos use deceptive mimicked alarm calls to steal food. Proc R Soc, 278:1548-1555

It's conference season, and as of this morning most of the Large Animal Research Group (where I am currently doing some work) is somewhere between Heathrow and Iceland, the country not the shop. I have recently found out that flying to the US via Iceland is a very cost-effective/good way to get an extra holiday in. They are all heading to ISBE 2014, in New York city, hosted by the unfortunately named Hunter College City University of New York Hunter (or Hunter CUNY - someone really dropped the ball on that naming). This is the big conference for behavioural ecologists and biologist, and is held biennially with the last one being in Lund 2012. I am of course very jealous, as there will be loads of amazing talks and chances to meet world experts and do some much needed networking. I am also sad to not be going as many of my friends from different universities all over the world will be attending and so it would be a great place to catch up with people. But this isn't supposed to be me feeling sorry for myself, I am going to put up a list below of some talks that would be great to see if you yourself are attending.

Here is a link to the conference website http://www.isbe2014.com, it isn't the best laid out in the world. It looks like it is going to be a really great conference and New York seems like a great place to host it. Good luck to everyone taking part, and hopefully loads of great collaborations come out of it.

So the list of talks that should be good:

BJ Ashton
Saturday session 3, HW615: 
Group size drives cognitive differences in a cooperative breeder

DL Cram
Friday session 2, HN C-002:
The oxidative stress costs of reproduction are mitigated by helpers in a cooperatively breeding bird

JE York
Saturday session 1,Lang HN 4th floor:
‘Dear-enemy’ of the collective: cooperative contributions to territorial defence under experimentally manipulated levels of threat

MJ Nelson-Flower
Tuesday session 1, Assembly Hall:
Male and females use different mechanisms to maintain high reproductive skew in a cooperative bird

T Flower
Friday session 3, HW 511:
The coevolution of an interspecific sentry signal between foraging mutualists

D Lukas
Tuesday session 1, Assembly Hall:
The evolution of male infanticide in mammals

S Cunningham
Saturday session 1, HW 615:
It's cool to be dominant*: social status and thermoregulation in birds

M Zöttl
Tuesday session 1, Kaye Playhouse
Queen succession, female-female competition and forcible eviction in Damaraland mole-rat (Fukomys damarensis) colonies

SW Townsend
Friday session 1, HW 511
The meerkat ‘animal moving’ call: functional reference in highly variable situations

A cool paper by Bell et al has just come out in Nature Communications (abstract and link below). The study uses a hormonal manipulation to investigate the evolution or reproductive suppression in cooperatively breeding meerkats. Similar work has been done on banded mongooses. The national press picked up this recent paper because it was on meerkats, who in the UK are Russian and compare car insurance prices (this statement isn't meant to detract from the quality of the research). However, the response of the public to this work has been a bit odd, read the comments on the bottom of the dailymail coverage. I think these comments highlight the publics lack of understanding of how science works. A large amount of the comments seems to say that this has been known for ages because it was on Meerkat Manor, and so thought the work pointless. But this work is new and novel, providing an experimental approach to testing the hypothesis of adaptive reproductive suppression. What the tv series reported was based on correlational data and theories, but this work has proved it experimentally. I just hope that these comments say more about dailymail readers than it does about the average persons understanding of science and how it relates to semi-fictional soap-opera-style documentaries.

Bell, Cant, Borgeaud, Thavarajah, Samson & Clutton-Brock (2014) Suppressing subordinate reproduction provides benefits to dominants in cooperative societies of meerkats. Nature Communications.
In many animal societies, a small proportion of dominant females monopolize reproduction by actively suppressing subordinates. Theory assumes that this is because subordinate reproduction depresses the fitness of dominants, yet the effect of subordinate reproduction on dominant behaviour and reproductive success has never been directly assessed. Here, we describe the consequences of experimentally preventing subordinate breeding in 12 groups of wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta) for three breeding attempts, using contraceptive injections. When subordinates are prevented from breeding, dominants are less aggressive towards subordinates and evict them less often, leading to a higher ratio of helpers to dependent pups, and increased provisioning of the dominant’s pups by subordinate females. When subordinate breeding is suppressed, dominants also show improved foraging efficiency, gain more weight during pregnancy and produce heavier pups, which grow faster. These results confirm the benefits of suppression to dominants, and help explain the evolution of singular breeding in vertebrate societies.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140722/ncomms5499/full/ncomms5499.html

and a link to that banded mongoose paper:
http://www.bandedmongoose.org/wp-content/uploads/Cant-et-al-2014-PNAS.pdf

An interesting new study has found a link between people's body clocks (chronotype) and their likelihood of being honest. The research found that 'larks' (people who like to get up early) were more ethical in the morning, while 'owls' (late-night people) were more honest at night. Below is the abstract and a link to the paper:

Gunia, Barnes & Sah (2014) The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time-of-Day. Psychological Science (Forthcoming)
The recently-documented “morning morality effect” indicates that people act most ethically in the morning because their energy wanes with the day. An estimated 40% of the population, however, experience increased energy levels later in the day. These “evening people,” we propose, should not show the morning morality effect. Instead, they should show the same or an increasing propensity toward ethicality in the evening. Two experiments supported this hypothesis, showing that people with a morning chronotype tend to behave more ethically in the morning than the evening, while people with an evening chronotype tend to behave more ethically in the evening than the morning. Thus, understanding when people will behave unethically may require an appreciation of both the person (chronotype) and the situation (time-of-day): a chronotype morality effect. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2461952

Biology letters have just released a list of their most read papers from June of this year, not papers published in June but just those that were read the most in that month. I thought that it might be a good idea to skim these and pick out the ones that I thought sounded the most interesting/weird and just share the paper and a link to it. I was going to post the abstracts but then I got carried away and chose a fair few, and if you are like me then you get bored when reading long blog posts on the internet. I've also just put a little clarifier as to why I think the paper is cool.

So, in no particular order, my top top read papers (from Biology letter, in June 2014). In addition, by chance and not design, it's also a top 10!

1. I like signal theory and any research that shows deception is pretty cool:

Brown et al (2012) It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system, Biol. Lett. 8:729-732
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/5/729.full

2. Research on cooperation and conflict extends from intracellular to ecosystem levels, this is just a very unexpected area to find cooperation:

Pearcy et al (2014) Team swimming in ant spermatozoa. Biol. Lett. 10:20140308
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140308.full

3. Hugging trees makes you cool, enough said:


Briscoe et al (2014) Tree-hugging koalas demonstrate a novel thermoregulatory mechanism for arboreal mammals. Biol. Lett. 10:20140235http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140235.full

4. Work on mate choice in humans usually focuses on things like facial symmetry, height or smell, this work just seems to be very different (and again it looks at honesty in signalling):


Neave et al (2011) Male dance moves that catch a woman's eye. Biol. Lett. 7:221-224
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/221.full

5. Just an amazing title, but also interesting work:

Levy (2013) Monsters are people too. Biol. Lett. 9:20120850
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120850.full

6. An interesting study on how environmental factors can strongly shape behavioural and physiological traits that are associated with sexual selection and mate choice:

Zuk et al (2006) Silent night: adaptive disappearance of a sexual signal in a parasitized population of field crickets. Biol. Lett. 2:521-524
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/4/521.full

7. The results are not really a surprise, but it shows how easy it is to manipulate our emotions:

Blumstein et al (2010) Do film soundtracks contain nonlinear analogues to influence emotion? Biol. Lett. 751-754
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/6/751.full

8. I always like research that can span disciplines, and this work spans psychology, behavioural biology and conservation. The work helps to justify, not that it's really needed, conservation of green spaces:

Fuller et al (2007) Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity. Biol. Lett. 3: 390-394
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/4/390.full

9. An evolutionary explanation for why your hands go wrinkly, who would not love this??

Kareklas et al (2013) Water-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects. Biol. Lett. 9:20120999
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/2/20120999.full

10. Preferential aggression towards kin, goes against most things I was taught as an undergrad and looks like a fruitful area of future research:

Dunn et al (2014) Higher aggression towards closer relatives by soldier larvae in a polyembryonic wasp. Biol. Lett. 10: 20140229
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/5/20140229.full

Here is the link to the full list: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/reports/most-read

I recently attended the annual Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting, organised by LARG, at the University of Cambridge. This small scale conference has been going for a number of years and allows researchers working on meerkats, banded mongoose, and other species at the Kuruman River Reserve and other random study species, to come together and talk about proposed future work and unpublished research. The atmosphere is great, very like a student conference, and allows a fairly informal environment for critical feedback. 
At this meeting a very different topic came up: a new educational book inspired by the work of the Banded Mongoose Project to inspire and educate children in Uganda and the UK. The project has brought out a book called 'Billy the Banded Mongoose', which you can buy or use (if you're a teacher) as an educational tool and the proceeds go to helping education in Uganda. Here is the link:
http://billythebandedmongoose.co.uk/

And here are some other links related to the Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting:
Kalahari Meerkat Project
Babbler Research
IEU at Zurich University

This is a very brief post to draw people's attention to some things that other people have done. One is an article that a former field assistant at the Babbler Project has written and the other is from PhD comics.

Firstly, Robbie Hopper, who was a PhD field assistant for James Westrip, has written an article about the Babbler Project and the research that has been done on those amazing birds (I am very biased as I spent four years working on them). So here is the link: http://ecopostblog.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/dabblings-with-babblers/

Secondly, PhD comics, the website that probably millions of graduate students look up on a regular basis to provide accurate commentary on their lives, has done a cool cartoon short about Miya Warrington's PhD thesis. This is awesome for two reasons: firstly, her thesis was really interesting and the science is sound; secondly, I sat next to Miya for two months when I visited Macqaurie University while I was writing up my PhD. She's a very enthusiastic and dedicated scientist and it's great to see her work publicised in this way! So here is the link:
http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1726