Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

Graduation is always an exciting day. Congratulations Sam Jones and Steph McClelland on your PhD success, and Sam, Ceri and Amaia on your MSc!

Our new paper has been accepted in Behavioural Processes, all about leadership in flocks of birds (pigeons, of course). Pigeon leadership hierarchies were similar across environmental context; familiar and unfamiliar. However, we found that no covariates (e.g. dominance, personality) could predict leadership score in either context, besides body mass, with heavier individuals leading group movements more often than lighter individuals.

Been a busy few weeks for everyone in the lab. Congrats to Amaia, who passed her MSc, and to Sam, for submitting his corrections. Congratulations to Ceri also, who submitted her MSc this week. Jasper and Jamie are busy releasing pigeons, while Rana is gearing up for her first visual field measurements at The Hawk Conservancy next month. Hana and Ursh are in South Africa, working with our collaborators in Pretoria, with some mole rat madness going on.

Our new paper is out in Royal Society Open Science. Congratulations first author, and very much lead author, Marina. You can read the paper here! All about emergence of splits and collective turns in pigeon flocks under predation.

Our new paper is out in PLOS Computational Biology – you can read it here!

Very happy to be welcoming new PhD student Robin Franks to the lab group. Robin is funded by the NERC London DTP, and is co-supervised by Robin Freeman (ZSL) and Elli Leadbeater.

Good news, our paper has been accepted in Royal Science Open Science. Congratulations first and very much lead author Marina Papadopoulou. This paper is a modelling approach, looking at our RoboFalcon empirical data.

Congratulations Marina Papadopoulou on getting our paper accepted in PLOS Computational Biology. Marina has been doing some fantastic modelling work on the pigeon/RobotFalcon data. More details to follow.

Huge congrats Steph on passing your PhD viva with minor corrections! And thank you to the examiners, Naomi Langmore and Dave Morritt.

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!