Cognitive and Behavioral Ecology Lab
New paper - we show that in chickadees, males with better spatial cognition sire more extra-pair young and that when a female has an EPY, it is sired by a male with better spatial cognition compared to cognition of her social mate. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Male chickadees with better spatial cognition sire more extra-pair youngelifesciences.orgNew paper from the lab by Sofia Haley: chickadees with better spatial cognition sing more songs royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
More smarts, more song: male chickadees with better spatial learning and memory abilities sing more throughout the dayAbstract. Cognitive abilities may allow flexible responses to variable environments, proving critical to individual survival in many species. When cognitivroyalsocietypublishing.orgNew preprint from the lab by @jwelklin.bsky.social : "Drought to deluge: Differential impacts of snow on mountain chickadee reproduction across the Sierra Nevada mountains" where we combine our long-term data with ebird data. Chickadees and snow - my favorite things! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
www.biorxiv.orgNew paper from the lab by @laurenwhitenack.bsky.social academic.oup.com/auk/advance-...
Fecal metabarcoding reveals differences in nestling diet across years with extreme variation in climate and arthropod availability in a montane songbirdAbstract. Animal diets are shaped both by the availability of resources and preferences for certain food items over others. Environmental conditions can afacademic.oup.comNew paper from the lab by Ai Ana Richmond - stronger associations with the locations used in serial reversal learning improves performance. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Client Challengelink.springer.comI am looking for a postdoc to work in our long-term system of food-caching mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The expected start is April 2026. Please see details here: chickadeecognition.com/positions If interested and qualified, please contact me directly (email on the website).
POSITIONSdefault descriptionchickadeecognition.comNew paper from the lab by Angela Pitera (last chapter of her PhD dissertation!) showing that food-caching chickadees rely on their own spatial memory when learning a spatial task and not on social learning. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Social group membership does not facilitate spatial learning of fine-scale resource locations - Behavioral Ecology and SociobiologyWhile many animals use social information to discover novel food sources, the importance of social information availability in the process of learning and remembering specific, fine-scale resource locations remains unclear. Benefits of using social information may vary with an individual’s ability to learn and remember resource locations and environmental conditions. We experimentally tested whether animals use social information from group mates to find and learn resource locations using wild, food-caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli). We tested spatial learning and memory performance by tasking birds with learning the location of one rewarding feeder out of eight using two treatments: (1) birds in the same social group shared the same feeder and (2) social group members had to learn different feeders. We found no evidence that access to social information from close social associates facilitates spatial learning and memory as there were no differences in performance between treatments. Most chickadees used personal information to find their feeder, but there were low and similar rates of social information transmission for both treatments. Our results suggest that chickadees use social information from conspecifics regardless of group membership or familiarity but primarily rely on independent learning and personal information when foraging in a familiar area.link.springer.comMy take on the amazing paper by Hanna Payne and Dmitriy Aronov on activation of hippocampal place codes by gaze in food-caching chickadees. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
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