Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

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.

A huge congratulations to Steph McClelland for submitting her thesis this week. A fascinating and fantastic body of work on the physiology behind brood parasitism.

Very happy our paper has been accepted in Ibis, all about how dominant pigeons (magenta, below) within a group are significantly more active than all other group members.

Thrilled our paper about eggshell wettability has been accepted in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Congrats to first author and postdoc Marie Attard, and thank you as always to the Leverhulme for funding the work. We show that body mass, annual temperature and eggshell maculation primarily explained variance in water contact angle across eggshells. More to follow.