POST BY: Cécile Sarabian Imagine living in an environment where pathogens and infectious diseases are everywhere. No hand sanitizer, no water purification tablets, no insect repellent, and potentially lots of infected mates. This is the scenario that most wild, social animals – including primates – have to cope with. Therefore, it is imperative for these species’…
Author: The Ethogram
Of People and Parasites
POST BY: Johnica Morrow It’s a few minutes after 8:00am and I walk into the lab to start another day of research. I turn on my favorite Pandora radio station, The 90s were great let’s hear it again, and carefully pull the cover off of my research microscope, the aptly named “Beauty”. The slide I…
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider: Sociality in Spiders
By Cameron Jones When you think of spiders, the idea of them living or working together is probably the last thing that crosses your mind. After all, aside from when an egg sac has just hatched, we rarely see spiders together let alone interacting with each other. There is good reason for this: in spiders,…
Examining Ecotourism – Does it stress out the monkeys?
By Dominique Bertrand Ecotourism is a growing industry. In 2001, United States citizens alone spent 32 billion dollars traveling overseas to view wildlife in their native habitats. This amount is expected to triple by 20201. Local populations often benefit financially from this industry due to the demand for lodging, food, and guides. However, this increase…
A Murder of Crows: West Nile in the Winter
By Mitch Hinton It’s fall and winter is rapidly approaching. For many in Davis this brings to mind mildly cooler temperatures and wetter conditions (we hope). To me however, as a bird enthusiast, fall signals the influx of migratory American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and their formation of massive
Deep Connections Might Make Us Nicer
by Curtis Atkisson That title, right?! Sounds like the most brain-dead obvious thing in the whole world. But, for those of us interested in they study of cooperation, it’s not that obvious, and the fact that deep connections might make us nicer is also pretty darn cool. Social network analysis is an amazing tool that…