Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

Big thanks to postgrad Luca for hosting a lab group social at his. Amazing food and hospitality.

We have some new arrivals coming this spring, as part of Sam Thompson’s PhD. Sam will be working with a variety of duck species, and we visited a duck breeding specialist.

Pleased our paper titled “Metabolic acclimation to captivity in highveld mole-rats (Cryptomys hottentotus pretoriae) is driven by sex-specific body mass increases” has been accepted in The Journal of Experimental Biology. Much gratitude to all co-authors and collaborators.

Congratulations first author Kyu-Min Huh on getting your first paper from your thesis accepted in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Our paper is all about “Natural take-off flight performance is repeatable and scalable in mixed flock tit species”.

Congratulations first author Caroline Brighton on getting our paper accepted, titled “Bio-informed blade patterns for mitigating bird collisions with wind turbines.”, with Graham Taylor.

Congrats Cecylia Watrobska on getting our paper accepted in Journal of Experimental Biology, titled: No detectable evidence for metabolic costs of long-term memory formation in honeybees, despite increased energy intake.

Congratulations Kyu Min on passing your viva with minor corrections, and thank you Profs Emily Shepard and Adrian Thomas for acting as examiners.

A fun yet challenging year, with many highlights. Robin Mehlhausen-Franks and Jamie Mayson both defended their PhDs with successful vivas, and Lucy Moore, Lucy Meddings and Alex Lamond graduated from their MSc’s. Delighted to welcome PhD students George Rabin, Sam Thompson and Gayatri Kumar to the lab group, and looking forward to postdocs Paddy Lewin and Marco Klein Heerenbrink starting on their respective projects in 2026. Enjoyable trips to the ASAB Winter Meeting and BES Movement Ecology Conference, and congratulations to Robin for winning a prize at the RHUL Postgraduate Symposium. A fun fieldwork expedition to the Shetland Islands in the summer reminded how much I enjoy fieldwork (the puffins and otters helped….). New pigeon lofts fit for a king should mean happy homing pigeons in 2026, and a number of other bird arrivals due in 2026 should make it a very fun year data collection wise. Very grateful to Graham Taylor for bringing me in on two grants that started this year, with the BBSRC and DEFRA/Crown Estate. Some very odd reviews for papers this year, which at times proved challenging to contend with! But managed to clear a backlog of 9 papers that took quite some time to get through, with many of them starting the submission process in 2022-2023.

We’re looking forward to Paddy Lewin joining us in the new year as a postdoc on our BBSRC grant.