Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

 Our paper on eider migration and body temperature has been accepted in Frontiers in Physiology. More details soon. Magella Guillemette (UQAR) leads the study.

Bit of prize success for PhD students Lucy Taylor and Dan Sankey. Lucy won best poster prize at the Annual Main Meeting for the Society for Experimental Biology (with “Fellowship of the Wing”), and Dan won best talk at the annual RHUL Symposium. Nice work.

Our new paper on pigeon laboratory behavioural traits and subsequent homing is out in Phil Trans B. You can read it here!

Thrilled to get a grant to undertake more research into the Bathyergidae group (inc. naked mole rats). Head to South Africa in October, working with Chris Faulkes (QMUL), Monica Daley (RVC) and Nigel Bennett (Pretoria).

Our episodes of David Attenborough’s Natural Curiosities will be shown on Sunday June 25th, 7pm, W channel. Featuring our eggshell work, and mostly, our Siamese Fighting Fish (thankfully just the animals on TV though, not me).

PhD student Lucy Taylor has had her first pigeon-related PhD paper accepted, entitled “Homing pigeons modulate wingbeat characteristics as a function of route familiarity”. The paper will be out in The Journal of Experimental Biology – more details to follow when published.