Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

Very sad to say goodbye to postdoc Marie Attard as our Leverhulme Trust grant comes to an end. Thank you Marie for your brilliant contributions to the group, your hard work, and collegiate approach. It’s been a pleasure!

Our new paper is out in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. You can read it here! Pigeons lose compensatory body mass in response to biologgers being attached.

Congrats Steph McClelland on the new paper out today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. You can read it here! We show that embryo movement is more frequent in avian brood parasites than birds with other reproductive strategies. Big thanks to our collaborators, a huge team effort.

Our new paper is out in J Roy Soc Interface. Congrats postdoc Marie. This is part of our Leverhulme funded eggshell project. You can read it here!

Our new paper is out in Ibis. Using accelerometer loggers we show just how much more active the dominant birds are in a group. You can read it here!

Our new paper is out in Journal of the Royal Society Interface – congrats Steph McClelland. You can read it here.

Delighted to welcome to other new MSc students to our lab, Vicky Luk (top) and Jess Austin (bottom), working on mole rat behaviour and hydrotherapy in dogs, respectively.

Congratulations Steph McClelland and a huge thanks to all our collaborators. Our paper all about emrbyonic muscle twitching in brood parasites and their hosts has been accepted in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

We’re pleased to welcome 4 new MSc students to the lab this year. The first two are Jasper Chaplin (above) and Rana Ozturk (below), working on pigeon behaviour and avian vision, respectively.

We’re thrilled to welcome new PhD student Jamie Mayson to the lab. Jamie will be working on flocking in birds, and is co-supervised by Alex Thornton (Exeter University). More to follow.