ASAB Summer Newsletter 2024

Dear ASAB members,

Welcome to another edition of the ASAB Newsletter!

First of all, a huge shout out to the ASAB Spring 2024 organising team at Exeter and to all of you who attended in-person and virtually! Thank you everyone for a wonderful meeting!

In this newsletter you can find:

• Message from the ASAB President

• Council Positions Available

• Former ASAB President (Pat Monaghan) elected to FRS

• ASAB Spring Meeting 2024 Report

• Upcoming Meetings

• News from Animal Behaviour

• Grants News - June 2024 deadlines

• Education Committee News

• Can the NEOF support your work?

• News from the Royal Society Publishing

I wanted to draw your attention specifically to the available positions on the ASAB Council starting in 2025: Secretary of the ASAB Ethics Committee, Secretary of the ASAB Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) Committee, Secretary of the ASAB Education Committee, ASAB Meetings Secretary, Ordinary Members of ASAB Council. There's more information below on these roles and how to be nominated.

As always, if you have any questions about ASAB's activities please get in touch at asabwebeditor@gmail.com. You can also keep up to date with announcements on animal behaviour opportunities in between our newsletters by joining our Animal Behaviour JISCMail!

If you want to contact specific members of the ASAB council, you can find their contact details here - we are always happy to answer your questions!

Happy reading everyone!

Sophia Daoudi-Simison

ASAB Communications Officer

Message from the ASAB President

It is a huge honour to take over as President of ASAB. I have been a member of ASAB for over 30 years, and despite joining other societies and attending a range of different scientific meetings, I have always regarded ASAB as my academic home. I am therefore very proud and excited to have the opportunity to lead the society for the next three years and to have a role shaping the future of animal behaviour both in the UK and internationally.

For those of you that don’t know me, I have the unusual privilege of being the second generation of ethologists in my family. My late father, Patrick Bateson FRS, was Professor of Ethology at Cambridge University. He was director of the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour (1976-1988), head of the Department of Zoology (1994-1996) and Biological Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society (1998-2003). Amongst his many appointments, he was editor of Animal Behaviour (1965-1969) and president of ASAB (1977-1980). My dad instilled in me a love of animals and from an early age I was determined to become an ornithologist. When it became clear that I wanted to follow in his footsteps he had some initial misgivings—he worried that I would never get a job—but he always supported me. Later in my career, it was fantastic to be able to talk to him about the details of my research. Despite his love and support, his has been quite a hard act for me to follow and I have always struggled to believe that I could even begin to live up to his achievements. Being elected as president of ASAB is therefore a very special honour and responsibility.

Since being elected I have been reflecting on whether there are specific things I want to achieve during my tenure. I have been very affected by the replication crisis. It has shaken my faith in science and I am genuinely worried that the foundations of our discipline are rather less secure than we would like to believe. In 2020, I had the opportunity to update the text book Measuring Behaviour with my father’s former PhD student Paul Martin and in doing this I read a lot about the replication crisis and the open science movement. As a result, I strongly believe that we need to move towards open sciences practices such as preregistration and sharing of data and code becoming normative in animal behaviour. There is a lot of resistance to change, often as a result of misconceptions about what these practices involve, and there is work to be done to sort this out. I have been trying to adopt these practices in my own research and am motivated to try and help others do the same. I hope to make progress in this area over the next three years.

I am also committed to ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to participate in ASAB activities and is treated with respect. I was very lucky to grow up in an environment where I was never made to see my gender as an impediment to achieving what I wanted in life. I learnt to succeed in a male-dominated environment, sometimes ignoring or tolerating behaviour that would no longer be regarded as acceptable, because nobody thought to question it. However, things are different now. ASAB takes equality, diversity and inclusion very seriously and I will do what I can to support this. One change that we will definitely see in the next few years is a spreading of ASAB activities into countries such as India and China where scientists do not have a strong tradition of publishing in Animal Behaviour or attending our conferences, but where interest in behavioural biology is on the rise. We need to think creatively about how to help scientists from these countries present their science to the best effect and how to include them in our activities. As a first step in this direction, Behaviour 2025 is being held in West Bengal, India next summer and ASAB will be supporting this meeting.

I’d like to encourage ASAB members to contact me if you have ideas for the society, or comments or complaints about how we do things. I can be emailed at: melissa.bateson@ncl.ac.uk

Professor Melissa Bateson ASAB President

Positions on ASAB Council

Several positions are available on ASAB Council to begin in January 2025 (or earlier).

The positions are: Secretary of the Ethics Committee, Secretary of the EDIA Committee, Secretary of the Education Committee, Meetings Secretary and two Ordinary Members of Council (one of which should be an Early Career Researcher).

If you are interested in being nominated for one of these positions, and contributing the work of ASAB, please send a 150-word statement outlining your motivation, experience and suitability for the role, to the current ASAB Secretary, Sasha Dall (s.r.x.dall@exeter.ac.uk) by June 14th 2024.

Your nomination should be supported by at least two members of the Association, also by email to s.r.x.dall@exeter.ac.uk by June 14th 2024.

Nominated candidates will be put forward for an online election by the membership. Council may nominate candidates and reserves the right to add nominations after the closing date in the event of a lack of suitable candidates. Council also reserves the right to generate a short-list of not less than three candidates per position for online elections.

Officers and ordinary members of ASAB Council will normally serve three calendar years, commencing 1st January. Reasonable expenses are reimbursed to support attendance at Council meetings and associated ASAB conferences, and a small annual research grant is provided for ASAB Council Officers in support of animal behaviour research activity.

Further information on the roles is provided below. For more details or to discuss the Officer roles, please contact the current Secretaries (contact details provided below).

Best regards, Sasha Dall (ASAB Secretary)

Further Information:

Secretary of the ASAB Ethics Committee

The Ethics Secretary (ES) represents the Ethics Committee (EC) on ASAB council and attends three scheduled council meetings per year, and an Annual General Meeting (AGM). At each meeting the ES presents a report on the activities of the EC, covering the time-period between meetings or, for AGMs, the preceding year. As Ethics Editor on Animal Behaviour, the ES provides ethics reviews and handles papers referred to them by members of the EC. The ES is responsible for recruiting members to the EC to ensure a wide range of reviewer skills are available to the journal. The ES is also responsible for leading revisions of the ‘Guidelines for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals in behavioural research and teaching’. The ES also handles queries from ASAB Council, ASAB members, or the public regarding ethical issues and current best practice with respect to the treatment of animals used in research and teaching.

Current Ethics Secretary: Dr Ines Fürtbauer i.fuertbauer@swansea.ac.uk

Secretary of the ASAB Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) Committee

The EDIA Secretary represents the ASAB EDIA Committee at ASAB Council. There are currently 24 members in the committee (https://www.asab.org/edia-committee), committed to encourage learning, discussion and understanding of EDIA principles and to provide support and opportunities to underrepresented groups and minorities. The EDIA secretary attends three scheduled council meetings per year, and an Annual General Meeting (AGM). At each meeting the EDIA Secretary presents a report on the activities of the EDIA committee, covering the time-period between meetings or, for AGMs, the preceding year. The EDIA committee meets periodically and, when needed, members are involved (by email or during online meetings) in ad-hoc discussions to provide recommendations to other ASAB committees, to the Society in general and to its members. The EDIA secretary attends the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group (DIWG) of The Royal Society of Biology.

Current EDIA Secretary: Dr Chiara Benvenuto c.benvenuto@salford.ac.uk

Secretary of the ASAB Education Committee

The role of the Education Secretary is to work closely with the Education Officer and the rest of the Education committee to support the provision of activities and resources from primary through to Higher Education. This includes overseeing education grant provision, working with other learned societies e.g. Royal Society of Biology and Awarding bodies e.g. OCR to engage with policy development and engaging directly with Outreach and in-class resource provision for the society. The Education Secretary also works closely with other council members, particularly the EDIA and Communications and Social Media Officers to ensure cohesive messaging in-line with our yearly calendar of activities e.g. PRIDE and Black History Month, as well as supporting the Student sub-committee.

Current Education Secretary: Dr Julia Myatt j.p.myatt@bham.ac.uk

ASAB Meetings Secretary

The Meetings Secretary (MS) is responsible for organising and assisting in running ASAB meetings, both in person and virtually. Annual ASAB meetings include: Spring meeting - you need to find an institution and local team to host the event; Winter meeting - you need to find a venue (currently in Edinburgh), arrange catering etc and solicit a team to organise the science of the meeting around a central theme; Summer meeting - this is usually held in conjunction with ECBB or IEC in which case you will liaise with the organisers, support them in choice of plenaries and advise them on logistics. In some years the Summer meeting may not coincide with a European venue in which case you may organise a UK/EU based conference or an online meeting, soliciting a host institution and team and assisting with logistics. In addition to these regular meetings, you should initiate and/or support irregular meetings e.g. the ASAB/ABS Twitter meeting, ISABC meeting, more specialist workshops such as the animal welfare meeting, and online conferences to ensure broad accessibility. At each meeting, you should give a short talk in person on behalf of ASAB, introducing Council members present, promoting the journal and membership, advertising future ASAB meetings, providing moral and logistical support to the local organisers and generally flying the ASAB flag.

Current Secretary: Joah Madden j.r.madden@exeter.ac.uk

Ordinary Members of ASAB Council (x2 positions available)

This role involves attending three ASAB Council meetings a year, and contributing to the affairs and decision-making of Council. Council meetings coincide with the three annual ASAB conferences, the Spring, Summer and Winter Meetings, with the ASAB Annual General Meeting held at the Winter Meeting. As an Ordinary Council Member, you may be requested to help in promoting ASAB’s activities, for example by joining or contributing to the work of our committees.

Former ASAB President elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society

Professor Patricia (Pat) Monaghan, Regius Professor of Zoology at the University of Glasgow's School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of sciences. The Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, elects exceptional researchers from around the globe based on their invaluable contributions to science.

See here (https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_1073829_en.html ) for the full press release.

Pat served as ASAB President from 2017 to 2020. Please join us in congratulating her on this remarkable achievement.

ASAB Spring Meeting 2024 Report

The Conference

There were three fantastic plenary talks over the two days including: (1) Sigrunn Eliassen - Professor in Evolutionary Ecology at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen, Norway – on Adaptive decision–making and animal interactions in social networks. Including a fun interactive activity to illustrate how there can be multiple solutions to a task/problem; (2) Stephanie King - Associate Professor in Animal Behaviour at the University of Bristol – on Unlocking the secrets of dolphin cooperation in the wild, a study site in Shark Bay, Australia, where they have been collecting data for ~42 years!; (3) Tom Tregena - Professor of Evolutionary Ecology, University of Exeter – on Selection and variation in insect behaviour in the wild.

However, it was not just the plenary sessions that impressed attendees; the contributed and flash talks along with the posters presented by the students were of an exceptionally high quality. Congratulations to Awani Bapat (University of Vienna) on their winning poster 🏆: Do common ravens use objects to mediate social interactions?, with honourable mentions going to Ari Drummond (University of Plymouth): Shift Attention - Antennules as indicators of crustacean attention & interest, Katie Crawford (Liverpool John Moores University): Can plasticity in hibernation behaviour help European hedgehogs adapt to urbanisation, and last but not least Roxanne Holmes (University of Cambridge): Lionfish activity in response to coral reef soundscapes!

In addition to the educational sessions, the conference organisers also planned a fun and engaging social program, including the conference dinner and Celidh (West Country style) at the Exeter Phoenix. A perfect way to socialise after a long day of learning about animal behaviour!

Looking forward to seeing you all at the next meeting!

Sophia ASAB Comunications Officer

Upcoming Meetings

Get out your calendars, it's time to plan for this year's ASAB meetings!

ECBB/ASAB Summer Meeting 2024

Visit the conference website

When: 16th-19th July 2024

Where: Zurich, Switzerland

Conference attendance grants more than £500 (only Developing Country applicants): 1st April 2024 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Conference attendance grants up to £500: 1st June 2024 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Abstracts submission deadline: has now passed March 29th 2024

Registration deadline: TBA ~June 2024

Join us for ECBB 2024, a joint meeting with the 2024 Summer Meeting of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB).

The theme of this conference is 'Long-term studies in animal behaviour'. Come hear more about these and many other topics in behavioural biology.

ASAB Winter Meeting 2024

When: 12th & 13th December 2024

Where: Edinburgh, Scotland

Conference attendance grants more than £500 (only Developing Country applicants): 1st August 2024 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Conference attendance grants up to £500: 1st October 2024 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Abstracts submission deadline: TBA

Registration deadline: TBA

Organising future ASAB meetings

We currently have opportunities for ASAB members to organise the ASAB Winter 2025 meeting (December 2025) and the Spring 2026 meetings. For the winter meeting, we look for a theme (recent ones include Animal Movement and Animal Cognition) - you (typically a team of 3-5 people) do the science and we (ASAB) do the logistics. For the Spring meetings, we look for an institution to host 2 days of talks and one of professional development - ASAB provides support, advice and some funding. For details of what this entails either please see https://www.asab.org/organise or contact Jo Madden, ASAB Meetings Secretary (j.r.madden@exeter.ac.uk). Without your offers to help with meetings, they will not be able to go ahead. 

News from Animal Behaviour

Please remember that we are able to support so many animal behaviour endeavours (e.g., three conferences a year, a wide range of grant options and many educational activities) because of the funding that we receive from the publisher (Elsevier) of our society journal, Animal Behaviour. That funding will only continue to exist if the journal remains a success… so please do submit your great work to us and assist when asked to review papers.

In addition to Research Articles and Reviews, we now also publish Methods and Dataset papers. And if you needed any more incentive, there are paper prizes too.

Helping the journal any way you can is ultimately for the benefit of all in ASAB.

Thank you!

Grants News May 2024

The next grants application deadlines are:

1st June 2024 for Research Grants and Undergraduate Project Scholarships

1st June 2024 for Conference Attendance, Childcare and Accessibility Grants for ‘ECBB 2024 Zurich’, Switzerland – please note that the deadline is already passed for the upper (‘developing country’) tranche of Conference Attendance Grants

1st August 2024 for applications that include the upper (‘developing country’) tranche of Conference Attendance Grants (and any accompanying Childcare and Accessibility Grants applications) for ‘ASAB Winter 2024’ in Edinburgh, UK. Other applicants requiring an early decision (e.g., to facilitate a visa application etc) may also apply in this round.

ASAB Interdisciplinary Workshop:

“Studying canine cognition and behaviour – towards standardisation of research methods and protocols for enhanced replicability of results”

Grants awarded in the December 2023 and February 2024 application rounds

Research Grants (February round): 6 applications were received and 3 grants were awarded:

• Rubina Mondial (IISER Kolkata, India). Balancing Act: The Impact of Community Feeders on Free-Ranging Dog Populations. £ 10,000

• Leanne Proops (University of Portsmouth, UK). Do non-human animals exhibit the Bouba-Kiki effect? £ 9,910

• Susanne Schultz (University of Manchester, UK). Zebra network stability. £ 9,200

Undergraduate Project Scholarships (February round): 6 eligible applications were received and 2 awarded:

• Neda Aleksiejūtė (University of Padova, Italy): Numerical discrimination (abilities) in pigs. £ 4,510

• Grace Balchin (Swansea University, UK): Collective movement of marine megafauna: addressing the data gap with novel sources. £ 4,600

Conference Attendance Grants: 57 applications were received for the ASAB Spring 2024 Meeting in Exeter, UK, 2 of which were not eligible. 54 of the 55 eligible applications were awarded (including 2 out of 3 eligible applications from Developing Country applicants, who were offered grants for the ECBB 2024 in Zurich). The amounts awarded were £23,638.10 for ASAB Spring 2024, and £3000 for ECBB 2024.

Accessibility Grants (December and February rounds): One late application was received in the December 2023 application round for the ASAB Winter 2023 meeting and awarded £400.75. There were no applications in the February 2024 round.

Childcare Grants (December and February rounds): These grants contribute to the additional costs of childcare for ASAB members attending ASAB conferences. 2 eligible applications were received in the February round, and both funded. The total amount awarded was £743.10.

ASAB’s first Accessibility Grant awarded!

ASAB Accessibility Grants were introduced in early 2022 and contribute to additional costs of conference attendance due to health, medical or disability issues, including additional travel or accommodation expenses. All ASAB members are eligible to apply, and ASAB expects to fund a high proportion of eligible applications and repeat applications. Accessibility Grants may be held alone or in combination with Childcare Grants (all ASAB members eligible) and/or Conference Attendance Grants (eligibility restricted to members who are registered for a higher degree or without access to other funding for conference attendance, or are ‘developing country’ applicants). For further details, see the Accessibility Grants webpage or contact the ASAB Grants Secretary.

Education Committee News

Our Education Officer is going on the road and looking forward to attending Science Festivals across the country, starting in Wrexham and ending up at the Big Biology Day Cambridge. Watch this space!

We want to award undergraduate prizes for 2024… If you have a worthy undergraduate please nominate them here.

Can the NERC Environmental Omics Visitor Facility support your work?

Since 1998,the NEOF Visitor Facility at Sheffield has supported over 500 projects and provided bespoke one-to-one training to 200+ PhD students. Access to expert training, well equipped laboratory facilities, alongside funded consumables and sequencing, enables the support of a wide range of molecular techniques to investigate diverse research questions and complete a wide variety of studies. Lab access and support is complemented by the provision of project specific one-to-one training in data analyses by the NEOF bioinformatics team.

 To illustrate the opportunities available, we hear from Sarah Biddiscombe who has received training and is completing her project at the NEOF Visitor Facility.

Sarah is a researcher studying kinship and the behaviour of Long-tailed Tits. This long-term project is led by Ben Hatchwell at the University of Sheffield. Sarah has been genotyping her samples in the NEOF lab, after spending her summer in the field observing behaviour, ringing nestlings and collecting samples. She tells us a little bit about her work:

"Dispersal through fitness landscapes in a social bird: from individuals to populations"

The project is focused on a population of Long-tailed Tits (Aegithalos caudatus), located in the Rivelin Valley, around 3 miles west of Sheffield’s city centre. Long-tailed tits are the UK’s only cooperative breeding species, making them the perfect study species to ask behavioural questions on.

 In this project we aimed to investigate whether individuals relied on environmental and habitat cues to make dispersal decisions. We first quantified the link between vegetation features and habitat attractiveness and found that natal dispersers are moving towards more attractive habitat than where they were born. We then measured the link between habitat attractiveness, measured as the density of nests and reproductive success. Interestingly, we identified a mismatch between habitat attractiveness and reproductive success, suggesting that habitat is not a reliable indicator of fitness. Altogether, our results shed light on the potential impact of public information and conspecific attraction in natal dispersal decisions, underscoring the need for further exploration into the role of social landscape in shaping such decisions. 

The Long-tailed Tit project is a long term study that has been going for over 30 years. Over these years many different aspects of the bird behaviours and lives has been studied, from their social interactions and mate choices to the unique structure of their nests. These long term projects allow us to follow population trends over many decades and allow us to answer questions that require long term data sets.

NEOF has been a vital part of the project over the years, providing genotype training to new team members. Not only did we receive training for the physical laboratory work but also the analyses of the data created. The staff at NEOF are very knowledgeable and supportive of your work and help to problem solve any issues occurred during the research. The NEOF are now supporting the project with providing the most advanced, analyses process possible, shortening the time and effort required to complete the research.

 The project has been using to the NEOF facilities to genotype all the blood samples collected from the population of Long-tailed tits. This allows us to know the parentage of all individuals within the population and is especially important for knowing the genetics of the unringed birds within the population. This data allows us to answer questions on kin recognition and helping behaviour.

I would highly recommend anyone wanting to investigate any genetic research to apply to NEOF, as you will be able to receive fantastic knowledge and support, with highly advanced facilities to help you reach your research goals.

The project recently won EPSRC funding for a 5-year project titled ‘Constraints on adaptation in social animals: kin recognition mechanisms and the fitness consequences of discrimination rules’ This new grants has allowed for the lab group to expand and gain, two new postdoctoral researchers, three research technicians and a PhD student to undertake this new research. We will employ a range of state of-the-art methods to quantify and analyse metrics of social affiliation and two putative phenotypic cues to kinship, acoustic and olfactory, determining how accurately they encode relatedness information.

News from the Royal Society Publishing

The following issues from Royal Society Publishing Philosophical Transactions B are highly cited, widely read and are FREE to access: 

 The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines organized and edited by Andrew Whiten, Dora Biro, Ellen C Garland and Simon Kirby and the articles can be FREELY accessed directly at www.bit.ly/PTB1843 

 The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies compiled and edited by Eli D Strauss, James P Curley, Daizaburo Shizuka and Elizabeth A Hobson and the articles  can be FREELY accessed directly at www.bit.ly/PTB1845 

The power of sound: unravelling how acoustic communication shapes group dynamics compiled and edited by Elodie F Briefer, Bing Xie, Sabrina Engesser, Cedric Sueur, Todd M Freeberg and Josefine Bohr Brask and the articles can be accessed at  www.bit.ly/PTB1905  

 A print version is also available at the special price of £40.00 per issue from sales@royalsociety.org