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’…

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…

  Imagine a young woman walking into a bar looking for a date. Now imagine the men in the bar attempting to impress her, either by buying her drinks, dancing, or otherwise showing off. At the end of the night, one of these lucky men will be successful and leave with our imaginary woman. This…

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,…

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…

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

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…

One of the fundamental virtues we are taught to expect from science is the reproducibility of its results.  For such a vanilla concept, reproducibility is argued over quite a bit in the scientific community, especially in the wake of the open-source-software movement (1, 2, 3).  It is in this spirit that I would like to share my user experience with GitHub, a…

Many elephants in zoos show warning signs that cause managers and scientists to be concerned about their welfare. Among these signs are the expression of abnormal, repetitive behavior (called “stereotypic behavior”), poor reproductive success, and high levels of obesity1,2. Could these issues be related to the social environments that zoo elephants experience? Elephants are extremely social animals….

When you step outside in the springtime, your senses are often inundated with the warmth of the air, the smell of flowers, and the songs and calls of numerous species of birds. The loud, broadcast songs that you are hearing often carry two messages simultaneously.1 First, the song serves as a