Category Archives: my research

Bird social networks

Posted on by
2

Facebird. Instagrebe. Tikstork. Linkedpenguin. Twitter. Only one of these is real, and I’m pretty sure that even on Twitter the number of actual birds participating is negligible. Birds do have social networks though—the old-fashioned analog kind, made up of flockmates and siblings and reproductive partners and rivals. Some species, like the Black-capped Chickadee, have tight-knit flocks with elaborate social hierarchies; others, like the Hermit Thrush, live most of their lives alone. These differences are surely fundamental to shaping the lives of birds, from their mundane daily experiences to how they tackle life-or-death challenges. If you spot a deadly predator like a Cooper’s Hawk, do you try to disappear quietly into the brush or do you risk your safety by giving an alarm call to warn your companions?

Continue reading →

Frog season

Posted on by
1

Frog season is upon us, and for us in the Frog Lab, regular sleeping hours are a luxury of the past. In the day we hide from the sun in basements and prepare our equipment.

IMG_2556

Painting frog models to perfectly match real frogs.

IMG_2742

Calibrating a speaker so that it ouputs the sound of a frog call at exactly 85.0 dB.

In the night, we don our chest waders, take up our headlamps, hang bags of tupperware from our wader straps, and walk into the ponds to seek our prey.

Continue reading →

Can tuco-tucos survive a volcanic eruption?

Posted on by
2

If any animal ought to be able to expect a safely uneventful life, it’s the compact, guinea-pig-adjacent tuco-tuco. These South American rodents live in burrows underground, popping up into the dangerous above-ground just long enough to grab some veggies for dinner and then retreating again into their tunnels. Male tuco-tucos have the occasional reckless phase, during which they travel above-ground in search of tunnels inhabited not by familiar females but by attractively novel females; but aside from that, they stay underground.

varma_tuco

Wild tuco-tuco. Photo by Anand Varma, former member of the Lacey lab; http://www.varmaphoto.com/

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the danger also came from underground, pushing through its own tunnels, burrowing upwards like a hungry tuco-tuco. Late on June 2nd, 2011, and continuing through June 3rd, in the area around the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic complex in Chile, more than one thousand earthquakes shivered the earth. They came more and more frequently, until by midday June 4th they were coming more than twice per minute, a near-constant shuddering.

At 3:15pm a spot on the mountain exploded and sent a 5km-wide ash and gas plume into the sky.

Continue reading →

New state, new science (and some old science too)

Posted on by
2

The early stages of a scientific career are designed to be unstable, slingshotting you from place to place as you acquire new skills. I bucked this paradigm somewhat in the first years after finishing my PhD, teaching and working on local projects in order to stay in the Bay Area; but the lure of learning from a cool new lab (and having health insurance) proved irresistible. At the end of August this year I moved out to Minneapolis to start a postdoc.

Continue reading →

I knew there was a reason I kept all of my field gear…

Posted on by
4

And that reason is that I am a hoarder. But that turns out to be fortunate, because I’ve become involved in a project that just so happens to need someone to go sample some birds for them, and I already have all the tools.

In a few weeks a co-conspirator and I will head off to North Carolina and West Virginia to chase three target species:

17708999934_d5cfdd38ba_z

Kentucky Warbler. Photo by Julio Mulero: www.flickr.com/photos/juliom/

Continue reading →

The massive/tiny scale of ancient DNA

Posted on by
1

varma_tuco

Wild tuco-tuco. Photo by Anand Varma, former member of my lab; http://www.varmaphoto.com/

Take a tooth. Leave it in a cave for 5000 years. Retrieve it and examine the tooth: after all that time, those seasons passing and bacteria working away, what is left of the original animal? Not a lot; but not nothing.

There remains still some DNA from the original owner of the tooth, but degraded, fragmented into little pieces, and overwhelmingly outnumbered by the DNA of all the bacteria that have grown and reproduced and died in the tooth. Finding the DNA of the original animal would be like finding a needle in a haystack—if the haystack was really big and the needle was also a piece of hay, just slightly different from all the other hay.

And yet: we can do it.

Continue reading →

A new, fuzzier project

Posted on by
5

I feel almost disloyal, saying it, but here goes: I’m working on a new project. A non-junco project.

Not that I’ve stopped working on juncos. When we teach science, we tell students “Science is never finished”—true in the larger sense that science is always testing new hypotheses, refining old theories, and correcting erroneous ideas; but also true in the sense that we scientists pretty much never stop doing things once we start them. I’m still analyzing data on the juncos.

But I’m now also generating data on tuco-tucos.

IMG_7968

The noble tuco-tuco, a subterranean South American rodent.

Continue reading →

What can we learn from 1500 junco bills?

Posted on by
14

Every scientist has a few favorite science stories: those papers or sets of papers that we read early in our careers and then reread often, that we think of when we imagine our own ideal research program. One of mine—not exactly a hidden gem, as it’s in all the textbooks now, and is the subject of a very good general-audience book, The Beak of the Finch—is the Grants’ work on Galápagos finches. Peter and Rosemary Grant have spent decades documenting how bill size and shape in these finches fluctuates as rainy years and droughts change the food available on their small island. It’s as complete a picture of evolution in real time as anyone has ever drawn, and a powerful argument for predictable rules (like “bills must be the right size to open the seeds that are available”) leading to unpredictable outcomes in the complexity of a natural system. It’s beautiful.

I wanted to see if I could see similar patterns in the juncos. Like the finches, juncos are primarily seed-eaters. Unlike the finches, the juncos are not neatly contained on a small island; and unlike the Grants, I did not have 30 years to study them. Fortunately, I work in a museum, which is basically a biological time machine. Want to know what junco bills looked like in 1915? No problem!

IMG_7211

Thus my time communing with the long-dead feathered denizens of the specimen drawers. Where the Grants had had to live through the decades of data they acquired, I took a shortcut.

Like all shortcuts, however, there were some downsides. I did not get to live in the Galápagos. Also, I was very limited in which juncos I could measure: I might be interested in juncos from a certain mountain range, but if a junco from that range hadn’t been stuffed and placed in a drawer 70 years ago, I was out of luck.

Continue reading →

House Wrens are complicated, mysterious cheaters

Posted on by
21

IMG_4226

I got my start in ornithology studying the love lives of House Wrens. House Wrens pair up to raise their babies in a manner compellingly analogous to the human “nuclear family;” but, like most birds, both partners also often “cheat” on each other (i.e., copulate with other birds). This means that the male wren may have chicks in other nests besides his own, and he may end up caring for chicks that are not biologically related to him. (Note: edited. The original version of this sentence had a mistake.)

This sets up a number of interesting questions, such as: why cheat on your partner? Are the chicks sired by outside birds somehow better? Do males know when they are caring for chicks who aren’t their own? The answer to the latter question seems pretty clear (no, the males do not know), but the former two are more challenging.

Continue reading →

The very confused wren and the birdwatcher who noticed

Posted on by
7

In the spring of 2015, a male House Wren and his mate built their nest inside a nestbox near a honeysuckle. His mate laid her eggs and dutifully incubated them. Then, one morning— cheep! cheep! High-pitched calls and gaping red mouths cried hungry, daddy! and the male wren was off in a paternal tizzy, collecting bugs and delivering them to his new offspring.

It was, maybe, odd that his new offspring weren’t in the nest that he had built. It was, maybe, odd that other, larger birds were also feeding his babies. It might even have been called odd that his mate was still sitting in their nest, atop whole and silent eggs. But— cheep! No time for that! The chicks were hungry!

What this male House Wren was doing, no doubt to the profound irritation of his mate, was feeding the offspring of a pair of Northern Cardinals who had nested in the honeysuckle near his nestbox.

Continue reading →