Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

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!

Our new paper is out today in Proc Roy Soc B, all about eggshell conductance. Congrats Marie, and thank you Leverhulme for funding our work. You can read it here!

Thrilled our paper is out in Current Biology, and big Congratulations to Dan Sankey!! See below post for link to paper.

Had a fascinating time working to create this audio walk for Sheffield Doc/Fest. A different experience for me. My contribution was very small, but very much enjoyed the chats that led to this happening.

We are extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding an extension to our eggshell grant. And we’re thrilled that means postdoc Marie Attard will be with us for another 6 months.