Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

Congrats to Eleanor, whose MSc thesis has come back with Minor Revisions. A difficult year for all those doing an MSc. We’re looking forward to finishing the manuscript; all about comparative locomotion in the Bathyergidae group.

Very happy to welcome four new postgrads to the lab, Ursh, Sam, Amaia and Ceri. They’ll be researching mole rat physiology, aposematism and birds, metabolism and dominance in pigeons, and communication in giraffes. Exciting!

It’s been a bumper year for pigeon babies. So far we’ve had 20 babies. Amazing how fast they grow.

Regarding the below post, our paper is now out in Biology Letters and you can read it here!

Various news outlets have picked up on the work, including The Times (here) and The Daily Mail (here).

Great news today that our paper has been accepted in Biology Letters. This paper looks at (1) whether body mass determines dominance hierarchies in pigeons (it does), (2) how stable these hierarchies are over successive years (very stable), and (3) whether artificially mass loading the low body mass subordinates would make them rise up the rankings (it does).

This paper is based on my postdoc work at the RVC. Only taken me five years to finally get it published. More to follow when it comes out.

Was fun chatting to the Times of India about birds and flight, you can read it here!

Our new paper is out in Global Ecology and Conservation, looking at how effective underwater light deterrents in gillnets are with Long-tailed Ducks. Congratulations Jenny on your 2nd PhD paper. You can read it here!

Congrats Sam on your first PhD paper coming out. Based at the fieldsite in Honduras, all about territoriality and aggressive interactions in laughing-thrushes.

Congratulations to PhD student Jenny Cantlay, Our paper has been accepted in Global Ecology and Conservation. This paper, also part of Jenny’s thesis, investigated visual fields in Long-tailed Ducks, and then experimentally tested the effectiveness of LED deterrents in gillnets.

More to follow.

Glad people liked our slightly random paper on the impacts of moon phase on wild Barnacle Geese physiology.