Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

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.

Very pleased that our paper has been accepted in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Big congratulations to PhD student Steph McClelland on getting her 2nd PhD paper published. This work is in collaboration with Phill Cassey, Golo Maurer and Mark Hauber, and looks at calcium investment in eggshells across bird species. More to follow.

Thrilled our paper (with Prof. Craig White, Monash) has been accepted in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Titled “Externally attached biologgers cause compensatory body mass loss in birds”, we show that deploying a bio logger on captive homing pigeons causes them to lose the equivalent body mass. More to follow when published.

Damien Farine wrote an interesting Dispatches article to accompany our Current Biology paper, which was formally published today. You can read it here!