Michael Dockery, near the row of cabinets with D. Longsdon’s collection of Papilionidae; February, 2015.

It was with great sadness that we learnt of the recent unexpected death of Michael Dockery at the end of September. He was a passionate advocate for the science of animal behaviour, an inspirational educator, lover of moths and a meticulous academic.

As ASAB’s first Education Officer, appointed in 1994, Michael spent sixteen years championing the teaching of animal behaviour across all levels of education — from primary and secondary schools to colleges. He had a natural affinity for working with teachers, building strong and lasting relationships, and providing them with the tools to inspire young people’s curiosity about science and the natural world.

Among his many collaborations was his partnership with the late Audrey Eyton, the renowned animal welfare campaigner. Together with Professor Christine Nicol, they produced two influential educational videos that reached every school in the UK and were later translated into other languages and distributed internationally. These resources helped generations of students not only understand how animals detect the world around them, they also revealed the complex lives and abilities of farm animals.

During his tenure, Michael developed and managed a wealth of educational resources - many of which remain available and are widely downloaded from our website today. He connected with many teachers and enjoyed working with teacher training establishments, exam boards and learned societies alike, earning the deep respect and affection of all who collaborated with him.

When Michael retired in 2010, ASAB recognised his exceptional contributions by awarding him the ASAB Medal for his services to the science of animal behaviour. His work left a lasting legacy, shaping not only ASAB’s educational mission but also the way animal behaviour is taught and appreciated in schools across the country.

Michael Dockery was a quiet force for good - his dedication marked by gentleness and humanity. His influence endures in the countless minds he inspired and the compassion for animals he helped to foster. He will be deeply missed.

Tributes from colleagues

Professor Michael Reiss: In 1994 I managed to persuade ASAB to pay for an Education Officer to be based at Homerton College, Cambridge, where I had recently moved. I can well remember Stephen Tomkins (the Head of Department) and myself interviewing the short-listed candidates. One of them stood out – Michael Dockery. What shone through were his enthusiasm for animal behaviour (he talked excellently about his work on handedness in moths) and his ability to communicate. We had no hesitation in deciding he was our preferred candidate and were delighted when he accepted the offer of the post. Working with Michael in his time as ASAB Education Officer was a joy. He managed to combine real expertise in animal behaviour and an ability to get on with everyone with tremendous humaneness and modesty. He rolled out a series of successful initiatives and deserves tremendous credit for helping ASAB to ‘punch above its weight’ in school biology. As an indication of this, we managed to get behaviour into a revision of the science National Curriculum when many other far larger and better resourced professional organisations lost political influence. When he was awarded the ASAB Medal in 2010, the year that he retired, he wrote to me saying, inter alia, “December 31 2010 will be my fourth attempt to retire – my track record at retiring is singularly unimpressive! No doubt I’ll get there in the end. I was astonished at being given the ASAB Medal – especially when I looked at the list of previous recipients”. Indeed, it is a great roll call – Marian Stamp Dawkins FRS won it the previous year and Alan Grafan FRS the next. I do not think I have ever known a nicer man.

Stephen Tomkins Emeritus Fellow Homerton College: He is totally associated in my mind with his yellow underwing moths! Whenever I meet one of them (they are nowhere uncommon) I always think immediately of him! What a lovely man he was. He was such a gentle and compassionate person, and so easy to work with. Michael helped me a great deal with the BES brine shrimp work as well. He was a great observer and a good experimentaist. I shall miss his faithful annual correspondence. 

Liz Evesham and Jonathan Edwards: I have known Mike for many years. We worked together on various ant projects combing research ideas with teaching and learning. We even created a video and booklet for ASAB, having to redo takes of the video because of my bursts of laughter! Our ideas were often created over pots of tea when Mike would also ask about family and life! He was innovative, kind and considerate and professionally supportive. He will be sorely missed.

Sue Howarth: Seed beetles and leaf-cutter ants are the first thoughts that come to mind when I think of Michael.  It was so sad to hear that he died recently.  He was like a mentor to me when I was a university lecturer at Worcester nurturing trainee science teachers and introducing them to the wonders of animal behaviour and encouraging them to find a place for this oft neglected area of biology in the curriculum, beyond putting woodlice in light and dark petri dishes.  Because of Michael’s influence, in his role of Education Officer for ASAB, that curiosity about animal behaviour has passed to many practising teachers and their students across many schools. Michael once invited me to visit his lab at Manchester Metropolitan University, where I remember envying the tubes running around his room containing scurrying ants bearing their freshly-cut leaves.  It was Michael who introduced me to the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour and the amazingly useful newsletter produced for schools.  Above all, I remember that he always found time to answer queries and questions, and always with patience.  A kind and lovely human being.

Christine Nicol Professor of Animal Welfare, Royal Veterinary College: Michael Dockery was the first education officer appointed by ASAB and he was instrumental in advocating for, planning and designing an animal behaviour resource for school teachers. His ideas for animal behaviour studies that could be safely and ethically conducted in or out of the classroom were highly creative, and formed an integral part of the early education output. Michael took the leading role in promoting the 'Let's Ask the Animals' and 'Stimulus Response' videos produced in the 1990s by Audrey Eyton and Christine Nicol. These illustrated the learning and cognitive capacities of farm animals and were an invaluable resource for primary and secondary teachers. Michael was responsible for the direct distribution of thousands of copies of these videos before they became openly accessible on the internet. He also inspired and arranged for their translation into other languages - just one example of how his unbounded enthusiasm touched and impacted so many people across the world. It was a total privilege to work alongside him.

Dr Rob Thomas: It was my great pleasure and privilege to work with Michael Dockery when I became Secretary of the ASAB Education Committee. At this time, Michael was approaching his retirement as Education Officer, subsequently succeeded by Charlotte Evans. Michael was a very calm, kind and wise figure, who always gave time to chat thoughtfully, bringing his vast experience and bright ideas to any topic. His books and other educational resources have been inspirational tools for pupils, students, teachers and lecturers across decades - what a wonderful legacy he leaves.

ASAB Winter Meeting 2025

Many thanks to the organising team of the ASAB Winter meeting held in Edinburgh last month. Laura Kelly, Jolyan Troscianko and Innes Cuthill curated an excellent, diverse and broad set of talks, plenaries (Prof Amanda Melin - Multimodal foraging in wild sympatric primates; Prof Barbara Caspers - Family affairs - the impact of chemical cues on bird social communication; Tinbergen Lecture, Outreach Lecture) and posters around the theme of How Sensory Information Affects Behaviour.

Tinbergen Lecture

Toshitaka Suzuki, Associate Professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, gave a fascinating Tinbergen Lecture on his research in animal linguistics. Language has long been considered uniquely human, yet growing evidence suggests that many of its cognitive foundations are shared with other animals. Over the past two decades, Toshitaka has studied the communication system of the Japanese tit, revealing striking parallels with human language. These birds produce referential calls that evoke specific visual search images in listeners and exhibit syntactic abilities, combining meaning-bearing calls into compositional messages. They even employ wing movements as symbolic gestures. The design of the experiments and the way Toshitaka approaches his research closely follow in the footsteps of Tinbergen, making this a particularly fitting and memorable lecture. If you would like to find out more about this fascinating work, you can explore his research on his website here.

Outreach Lecture

Written by Charlotte Evans, ASAB Education Officer

We were delighted to welcome students and staff from The Royal High School, George Watson’s College, and Edinburgh College, to the ASAB winter conference and listen to our plenary speaker Professor Innes Cuthil. Innes is one of the leading scientists in the world studying animal behaviour, colour, and camouflage. He’s been a Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Bristol since 1998. Innes has been working at the crossroads of biology, psychology and neuroscience — teaming up with experts in vision and perception to understand how animals use colour to hide, trick, or mislead the creatures that might want to eat them. His work has shown that camouflage isn’t just about blending in; it’s about fooling the mind of whoever’s looking.

His Outreach Lecture — “Animal camouflage: evolutionary biology meets neuroscience, art and war” — brought all of that together. From early artistic ideas about deception to the modern science of how different species see the world, he showed us all how evolution and perception shape the hidden lives of animals.

Congratulations to Professor Hanna Kokko on being awarded the prestigious ASAB Medal, presented at the ASAB Winter Meeting 2025 by the ASAB President Professor Melissa Bateson.

Professor Kokko is a world-renowned theoretical evolutionary ecologist whose research has transformed our understanding of how evolution shapes life. Her work explores why species differ so widely in their life-history strategies, how sexual selection evolves, and why cooperation and even cancer persist in nature. By combining theory with empirical insight, her groundbreaking contributions continue to shape key debates in evolutionary biology.

Student Prizes

Congratulations to Jonah Walker (right image) for winning best student talk on Multimodal signalling and mate choice across peacock spider species and to our student poster winners (left image, left to right) Helena Norman, Joey Baxter and James Robertshaw 🙌🎨🏆

ASAB AGM 2025

Thank you to all of our memebers who came along to the AGM during the Winter Meeting. If you missed it then fear not! You can access copies of the AGM 2025 agenda, collated reports and AGM 2024 minutes here.

Visit the conference website for information and registration.

When: 23rd-25th March 2026

Where: Bristol University, UK

Conference attendance grants more than £750 (only Developing Country applicants): 1st December 2025 (see also childcare & accessibility grants). Others requiring an early decision may also apply in this round.

Conference attendance grants up to £750: 1st February 2026 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Abstracts submission deadline: 1st February 2026 (23:59 GMT)

Registration opens: 1st January 2026

Registration deadline: 19th February 2026

The Spring conference is traditionally a postgraduate and ECR-focussed conference, and is a gentle, relaxed introduction to the conference circuit for many early career scientists, with career training available in the workshop and during the conference.

ECBB/ASAB Summer 2026

Visit the conference website for information and registration.

When: 1st-4th September 2026

Where: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

Conference attendance grants more than £750 (only Developing Country applicants): 1st April 2026 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Conference attendance grants up to £750: 1st June 2026 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Symposia submission deadline: 31st January 2026

Abstracts submission deadline: 14th March 2026

Early Bird Registration deadline: 31st March 2026

Join us for ECBB 2026, a joint meeting with the 2026 Summer Meeting of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB). The theme of this conference is 'Animal Behaviour in the Anthropocene. Come hear more about these and many other topics in behavioural biology.

ASAB & PSGB Joint Winter 2026

When: ASAB 8th-9th / PSGB 10th December 2026

Where: Edinburgh, Scotland

Conference attendance grants more than £750 (only Developing Country applicants): 1st August 2026 (see also childcare & accessibility grants)

Conference attendance grants up to £750: 1st October 2026 (see also childcare & accessibility grants). Others requiring an early decision may also apply in this round

Abstracts submission extended deadline: TBC

Registration: The venue’s capacity is limited and so registration will be essential – stay tuned for an announcement about this mid-summer!

Conference Theme: This year’s ASAB Winter meeting theme is on Social Learning and Culture. The last joint ASAB/PSGB meeting was held in 2015 on the same theme, at the ZSL London Zoo. More details to follow!

👩🏻‍💻📓✍🏻💡❄️ If you are interested in organising one of our Winter Meetings or have an idea about a theme then please get in touch with Vivek Nityananda our Meetings Secretary: meetings@asab.org

This “Meet ASAB” features Madam President herself: Melissa Bateson. Melissa was elected as ASAB president in 2024, and she has also been on the ASAB council in the past both as grants secretary and as an ordinary member. She has been an ASAB member since she was a doctoral student in the 90s, and, in fact, her first paper was published in Animal Behaviour! During her postdoc, she also benefited from an ASAB in order to conduct butterfly mate choice research.

Now, she is a professor of Ethology at Newcastle University, where she studies European starlings. Starlings are social, robust, fast learners, and long-lived, and there are a number of ecological parallels between humans and starlings: both species are invasive, omnivorous and opportunistic. Looking at foraging decisions and food unpredictability in starlings, including physiological, developmental and cognitive effects, can thus give us insight into human food insecurity.

As president, Melissa also needs to make decisions (but not about foraging). She chairs ASAB Council and is also a trustee, making her financially responsible for the charity, the law of which is quite complex. However, she also gets the far more fun job of handing out awards at conferences! The last two years, Melissa has been working with the other trustees to increase the professionalisation of ASAB operations, as well as advocating for open science practices, such as preregistration in animal behaviour. It’s not easy being president and she has done a wonderful job so far. Huge thanks to Melissa for all of her hard work.

One last little fun fact: Emily Williamson (nee Bateson), founder of the RSPB was Melissa’s great, great aunt! It looks like a love of birds may run in families…

A massive thank you to Ophelia Fritsch and Joanna Kennedy (St Andrew’s University) for spending the time to engage the students of George Watson College (Edinburgh). The young people (and a few keen and intrigued teachers) got to observe and record copulatory behaviours in a seed bug species. Everyone was really engaged in the activity and their curiosity and attention to details was great to witness. The students also asked numerous questions about the insects and the mounting and copulation behaviours they observed which led to the plot twist of the session. Out of the three bug pairs that each pair of young people observed, one of them contained two males. The students were intrigued and excited to have observed both different sex and same sex sexual behaviour in an insect. 

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. Please do therefore accept reviewer invitations whenever feasible and do send us your great work. We are extremely grateful to all who did that in 2025, as well as our brilliant Managing Editors, Editorial Assistant, Editors and Consulting Editors.

Animal Behaviour publishes three types of original papers.

(1) Primary research papers. These report new findings from field, laboratory, meta-analytical or theoretical studies.

(2) Methods papers. These describe (and, ideally, validate) a new approach to the study of animal behaviour. An example: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2023.10.013

(3) Data set papers. These provide and describe a major behavioural data resource for wider use by other researchers. An example: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.02.008

Animal Behaviour also publishes:

Reviews. These address fundamental issues relating to behaviour and provide new insights into the subject(s) they cover. Original interdisciplinary syntheses are especially welcome. A preliminary outline of up to 600 words should be submitted through the online portal.

Commentaries. These provide an opportunity to raise issues of general importance to the study of behaviour, including statistical analysis, theory and ethics.

Forum. This section is for critiques of published papers, providing an opportunity for constructive exchanges on issues surrounding particular fields of behavioural study.

Full details are available in the recently updated Author Guidelines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/animal-behaviour/publish/guide-for-authors

As of January 2026, authors will be required to provide code used to conduct statistical tests and to generate figures (as well as the underlying data, as now), on first submission. This is in line with our policies to promote greater openness in scientific research.

🏆 There are also three paper prizes each year, worth £2k each! 💰

Also recently published from Philosophical Transactions B is: 

• A solid base for scaling up: the structure of numeration systems compiled and edited by Andrea Bender, Jean-Charles Pelland, Simon J Greenhill and Mary Walworth and the articles can be accessed directly at  www.bit.ly/PTB1937

• Evolutionary functions of consciousness compiled and edited by W Tecumseh Fitch, Colin Allen and Adina Roskies and the articles can be accessed at www.bit.ly/PTB1939 

• Understanding age and society using natural populations organised and edited by Josh A Firth, Greg Albery, Sandra Bouwhuis, Lauren Brent and Rob Salguero-Gomez and the articles can be accessed directly at  www.bit.ly/PTB1916

• Animal culture: conservation in a changing worldcompiled and edited by Philippa Brakes, Lucy Aplin, Emma L Carroll, Alison L Greggor, Andrew Whiten and Ellen C Garland and the articles can be accessed directly atwww.bit.ly/PTB1925 

Print versions are also available at the special price of £40.00 per issue from sales@royalsociety.org