I had the amazing opportunity to go back to the Fitz last week to give a talk and get an award. Somehow I'd managed to get an award for the best PhD thesis submitted to the Science Faculty. The best part was that I got to go back to UCT, give a talk about the babblers and catch up with some friends I've not seen for a while.

So this is a random blog to inform people of the cool work that is being done by people at the Fitz (which is a great place to go and study birds).

Firstly, there were three people (my old office mates) who were away. Susie Cunningham, who is an amazing expert on the bill tip organ of kiwi and how they use it to find food (as well as the bill tip organ of a number of other birds), was away in the UK. Susie is working on the effects of heat on birds, with a view to understanding how climate change will impact bird populations [one of Susie's papers]. Secondly, Susie's PhD student and fellow Kalahari veteran Tanja van de Ven. Tanja is studying the same hornbill population that I helped Mike Finnie set up and looking at temperature effects on these amazing birds, using some cool thermal imaging video! Thirdly, Marie-Sophie Garcia-Heras (a mouthful of a name!) who is doing a PhD investigating factors that influence the movement of black harriers.

But I did get to see some people, and spend some time in the pub (where all serious science is done). Arjun Amar, who is now collaborating with Susie on the red-winged starlings that inhabit the campus, has been really successful with his work on sparrowhawks. Arjun has recently been involved in some slightly controversial but really important work on grouse and bearded vultures. Margaux Rat has just started a post doc with Susie on the Hot Birds Project after finishing her PhD on social weavers. Margaux's PhD was looking at the social interactions of this species that lives in such large complex colonies, she's got some papers in the works so watch this space! I also got to catch up with Chevonne Reynolds, who's just wrapping up her thesis investigating the much maligned Egyptian goose (which I always get told is actually a shell duck!) and she's recently had a paper published in Diversity and Distributions.

So all amazing scientists doing great work. If your interested in any of the stuff they are doing then look them up and I'm sure they'd be happy to speak to you!

The Fitz is a great place to do research and the people are one of the things that makes it.

This week has seen the playing out of an event that occurs fairly regularly in Africa, but this time it happened to a national treasure. Cecil the Lion was killed in Zimbabwe after a crossbow toting trophy hunter shot him with an arrow before tracking him for 40 hours. Since then there has been a huge amount of public anger and an outpouring of rage on social media against the America Walter Palmer, but is it all justified?

On a personal level I cannot understand hunting for sport. I find the idea of going out with the sole purpose of killing an animal just to kill it bizarre. Watching an animal in the wild fills me with such joy and I can do it for hours, most of my PhD involved just watching birds. However, I have been on hunts but these were all for food. The meat that we ate on the reserve that I worked on was shot on the reserve. Some people may feel that even this is too far, but in my eyes shooting for food is the same as buying meat from the supermarket.

But is hunting for sport intrinsically bad? This is a far more complicated question than it first seems. Lots of money goes directly into conservation from big game hunting. Without this money there are some conservation projects that might not be possible. Hunting can generate large amounts of income and some species are specifically bred for hunting, such as sable. This money can be used to create jobs and incentives for local people to conserve wildlife, preventing areas being converted to agricultural land (which would have a large impact on the wildlife that can be supported). The rarity of the species drives up the prices for those wanting to hunt the animal, for example a man recently paid $350,000 to shoot a black rhino. But this is where it gets difficult, some of these species are becoming so rare that the death of one individual will have a considerable impact on the population as a whole. There is a large difference between shooting a rhino and shooting a springbok. 

I'm not a conservation biologist but I know that the answer to this question is not set in stone. From what I have seen, the recent news coverage has been very one sided, in a similar vein to the social media storm. This is a very complicated issue, which doesn't just have moral arguments but many commercial and conservation elements too. In my view, if there are people who want to spend money to shoot animals then lets find a sensible and sustainable way of doing so that can enhance conservation. This may involve completely banning the hunting of species like lions and rhino, only allowing antelope to be shot. But again I stress that I'm not a conservation biologist. All I know is that I definitely would never be one of those people who would pay solely to kill an animal.

Here are some links to articles that try to deal with the question:
http://conservationmagazine.org/2014/01/can-trophy-hunting-reconciled-conservation/
http://endangeredspecies.about.com/od/endangeredspeciesconflicts/a/Can-Hunting-Help-Save-Endangered-Species.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/20/the-idea-that-hunting-saves-african-wildlife-doesnt-withstand-scrutiny
http://www.science20.com/anthrophysis/can_you_save_threatened_species_hunting_it-86729

As part of my job at Sense About Science, I have to read one of the UK's many newspapers every morning. We switch regularly, and so I've had the complete frustration of the Telegraphs science reporting, the bombasticness of the Daily Mail and the complete lack of any science reporting in the propaganda rag that is the Express. At the moment I'm on the Times, which seems to do a fairly good job, Tom Whipple seems to have his head screwed on. Most of what we are looking for is related to human health type stuff, whether it's chemical scare stories or misreporting on vaccines and the safety of drugs. As a zoologist I'm more interested in the stuff to do with animals or behaviour and so have started keeping stories that are in that field, not misreporting stuff but just interesting. 

So I'm going to start a series of blogs that are my take on a few stories clipped from the Times!

First up, yesterday's (6/6/15) reporting on a study that looked at how men behaved after they were 'shown' to be weak.Researchers tweeked the data they presented to 50 male participants after they had them do a hand strength test, telling half they were average and the other half they were below average, the same as the average woman. The test subjects had been informed that the test was of "the effects of exertion on decision making." They then had to fill out a form about themselves, which had some interesting results. Those who were told they had thee strength of a woman exaggerated their heigh by ~0.78 inches and reported twice as many previous relationships as the other group, in addition they claimed higher levels of aggressiveness and athleticism. 

This is a really cool study that shows that slights to a man's masculinity can result in him overcompensating. As the researchers point out, this is not just an interesting aspect of our behaviour but something that has everyday impacts in the world. In many societies men wield a large amount of power and how they perceive slights effects their behaviour. There are probably a number of evolutionary reasons for this relating to intrasexual conflict, but that's a can of evolutionary psychology worms that I will steer clear of!

Story two, ugly men can get good looking women but they have to be persistent (and vice versa)! Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin found that when a couple was asymmetric in attractiveness that it took longer from their first meeting to their first date. Couples who had 'love at first sight' were usually very closely matched in attractiveness, while those who took more than 9 months to get together didn't correlate at all. This is interesting as it raises lots of questions about the different features that inform mate choice in humans, do we perform assortative mating? and when we don't what are the features that we use, money? social status? or more intangibles like humour? or smell? This gives me the very tangential opportunity to link to a cool study that showed a link between physical ability and attractiveness!


Final story, spiders at sea.This was a cool little piece about why spiders are so good at colonizing new places, as they are frequently the first colonizers of new land. They do this by ballooning (video of it LINK), where they let out strands of silk that carry them away. Ballooning can result in spiders landing on water, be it lakes or the sea, but new research has shown that spiders are not only able to balloon but they can sail too! By dropping spiders from 21 species onto water researchers found that the spiders 'sailed' using their raised front legs to slide across the water, or 'anchored' themselves by releasing silk to stop themselves being blown away. Species that used ballooning more frequently to disperse were 'more eager' to using sailing. This is just some cool natural history that helps in understanding dispersal.


Hope some of those stories were interesting.