Call for nominations

Christopher Barnard Award and ASAB medal 2024

ASAB Council is seeking nominations for the Christopher Barnard Award (https://www.asab.org/barnard/) for outstanding contributions by a new investigator, and the ASAB Medal (https://www.asab.org/asab-medal/) for contributions to the science of animal behaviour.

Council would very much like to receive nominations for these prestigious awards by 1st December 2023. Further information about the awards including eligibility, lists of previous recipients and details of how to nominate can be found on the ASAB website (https://www.asab.org/grants-and-awards/). Nominations should be sent to the Secretary of the Society, Sasha Dall (S.R.X.Dall@exeter.ac.uk).

ASAB Meetings & Workshops

Andrew King and Marina Papadopoulou hosted an Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) Interdisciplinary Workshop at Swansea University on 6-8 September. PhD and undergraduate students Marco Fele, Grace Balchin, and Beth Lygo were workshop volunteers.   

The workshop “Biohybrid Systems in Animal Behaviour” was a free event attended by 50 biologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, and engineers from all over Europe. The workshop had three invited and three contributed talks each day, followed by discussions, and explored biohybrid systems in animal behaviour from three perspectives – Cooperation (day 1), Control (day 2), and Coexistence (Day 3).

Feedback from attendees was outstanding, and the workshop resulted in some exciting scientific and karaoke collaborations and the organiser and participants aim to publish a special issue on Biohybrid systems in the journal Animal Behaviour next year.  

Upcoming Meetings

ASAB Winter 2023
Animal Cognition: Pure to Applied

Visit the conference website

When: 13th & 14th December 2023 

Where: Edinburgh, Scotland

This year's Winter Meeting of the Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) will be held in Edinburgh on 13th and 14th December 2023, with the theme: Animal Cognition: Pure to Applied.

What an animal knows impacts all aspects of its behaviour. This conference will focus on both the fundamental mechanisms underlying cognition and its application to real-world problems such as conservation, ecosystem services, and welfare.

ASAB Spring 2024

When: Tuesday 23 April-Thursday 25 April

Where: University of Exeter

Conference attendance grant deadline is 1st December 2023 for Conference Attendance Grants for the ASAB Spring 2024 conference in Exeter, UK (23rd-25th April, 2024). This is an early round for ‘Developing Country’ applicants applying for more than £500 or any applicants requiring an early decision (eg to facilitate a visa application).

Hosts: Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour - Lauren Brent, Sam Ellis, Andy Higginson, Lisa Leaver

Please save the dates! More info coming soon

ASAB Video Contest 2023

The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) is running a science communication competition for our members attending the ASAB Winter Meeting 2023! To enter the competition, use this form to submit a 1-2 minute video presenting your (or your favourite) cool animal behaviour research on the conference theme "Animal Cognition: Pure to Applied"

Your video needs to include Closed Captions and should not exceed 500MB. You must have the rights to use all video footage contained in your video (e.g. any images/videos of animals should have been taken by you or be openly available under a Creative Commons license).

The deadline for submissions is Dec 1st, 2023.

There will be 2 prizes of £100 -- 1 decided by ASAB Council and 1 “people’s choice” to be judged at the ASAB Winter conference (https://asabwinter2023.org/). As well as the cash prize, the winning videos will be featured on the ASAB website, newsletters, and social media accounts.

Thanks so much for your entry to this competition! Good luck!

Grants News Sept 2023

The next Grants application deadlines are:

1st December 2023 for Conference Attendance Grants for the ASAB Spring 2024 conference in Exeter, UK (23rd-25th April, 2024). This is an early round for ‘Developing Country’ applicants applying for more than £500 or any applicants requiring an early decision (eg to facilitate a visa application).

Grants awarded in the February 2023 application round

Research Grants: 
9 applications were received and 3 grants were awarded.

• Javier Abalos (University of Lund, Sweden): Is there a trade-off between quality signalling and social recognition? An experimental test in wall lizards. £ 6,955

• Nicolas Adreani (Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Germany): HORNERO: Citizen Science and nest building behaviour in a neotropical ovenbird. £ 8,994

• Luigi Baciadonna (CNRS - University Paul Sabatier – Toulouse, France): Impact of emotions on attentional processing of hierarchical compound visual stimuli in honey bees. £ 9,600

Undergraduate Project Scholarships:
7 eligible applications were received and 4 grants awarded.

Daisy Cooper (University of Cambridge, UK): Nocturnal and diurnal audience effects on social interactions in a cooperatively breeding fish. £ 4,200

• Daisy Johnston-Barrett (University of Bristol, UK): How saltatory movement of prey affects the risk of predation. £ 4,200

• Bethan Lygo (Swansea University, UK): Identifying copulation events from accelerometer data in wild chacma baboons. £ 4,200

• WONG Ching Ki (City University of Hong Kong, China): Hong Kong buffalo: how dominance hierarchy affects wallowing behavior. £ 4,200

Conference Attendance Grants, Accessibility Grants and Childcare Grants awarded in the February 2023 round were reported in the ASAB Summer 2023 Newsletter.

Grants awarded in the June 2023 application round

Research Grants: 
9 applications were received and 2 grants were awarded.

• Martin How (University of Bristol, UK): To bubble or not to bubble: Quantitative advantages of closed-circuit rebreathers for behavioural studies of marine organisms. £ 7,026

• Andrea Sommese (Eotvos University of Budapest, Hungary): Mobile eye tracking in dogs. £9,910

Undergraduate Project Scholarships: No eligible applications were received.

Conference Attendance Grants:
A total of 69 eligible applications (spread between an early round in April and the standard June round) were received for the Behaviour 2023 conference in Bielefeld, Germany and all were awarded. The total amount awarded was £35,755, including £2200 to a Developing Country applicant. The awarded applications came from the following countries: UK (26); Australia (8); Austria (7); Spain (5); Czech Republic, Germany, India (4 each); Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands (2 each); and Denmark, France, Hungary, Israel and Poland (1 each).

Accessibility Grants: These grants contribute to additional attendance costs created by individual needs including - but not limited to - disability or medical needs for ASAB members attending ASAB conferences. No applications were received.

Childcare Grants: 4 eligible applications were received and all were awarded. The total amount awarded was £1758.

And finally, a top tip for ASAB grant applicants …

It’s a great idea to get feedback on your ASAB grant application from your supervisor or a colleague, but …  if you are submitting an edited version of the copy on which they made comments and tracked changes, be sure to delete the comments and either accept or reject any tracked changes. If you merely hide these, they may reappear when the file opened on another computer (for example the Grant Secretary’s laptop). This is not a good way to impress whoever is assessing your grant application 😉

Education Committee News

Thank you to all the brilliant scientists who took part in our Pride Month campaign. Our Twitter account was a rainbow of fabulous animal behaviour scientists from all over the world.

Undergraduate Recognition Award

The education committee is super excited to have awarded more prizes this year than ever before. Here is a full list on winners from 2023, congratulations to:

• Lauren Vane – University of Bristol

• Emma Baker – University of York

• Eden Green – University of Birmingham

• Daniel Joaquin Aguirre Howes – University of Swansea

• Rebekah Flatt – Hull University

• Wai yan Chan – City University of Hong Kong

• Anna McCue – Liverpool John Moores University

• Hazel Towns – University of Lincoln

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

Public Engagement Grant update

The ASAB Education Committee funded Sälfie-ID (based on the Swedish word säl “seal” and pronounced as Selfie) to connect with the Swedish target participants. The project aims to engage the public in research into seal behaviour and ecology by encouraging them to submit images and reports of seal sightings. Sightings can be submitted through the Sälfie-ID website (https://www.salfieid.com/), which is in both English and Swedish, or via email to salfie2023@gmail.com. The website also contains an overview of Swedish seals and a blog about current seal research. A primary goal of the project is that people submitting sightings, or curious about seals, have easy access to the facts.

The Brunel Museum would like to express their sincere gratitude for ASAB’s support, which allowed the museum to stay open for longer during the holidays. Their exhibition “Tales of Teredo navalis” highlighted the wonders of shipworms aa well as their behaviours. As a small museum, regularly open only three days a week, extending their opening days had a significant impact on their reach. By offering more days of operation, they were able to welcome a larger number of visitors and introduce them to the Thames Tunnel history and its legacy.

Upcoming

Come and say hello if you are around Oxford on the 7th of October or Cambridge on the 14th. We are taking part in Oxford IF: Sonic Spider – Music from an arachnid world. Followed the next Saturday by Hills Road Sixth Form College’s Big Biology Day, Cambridge. We are very excited for both events and will be all singing and dancing.

Can the NERC Environmental Omics Visitor Facility
support your work?

This year is the 25th anniversary of the founding of a Facility to support UK environmental researchers. Since 1998, the NEOF Visitor Facility has supported over 500 projects and 200 PhD students. NEOF provides training and laboratory facilities to support a wide range of molecular techniques, as well as bespoke one-to-one training in data analyses. The laboratory at Sheffield is well equipped and experienced staff provide training and support throughout the visit, which can be up to 6 months. There is a simple application form, and guidance on project design is available, as required. If your application is funded, in addition to access to training and facilities, all consumables costs for the project are covered, including next generation sequencing, if requested.

To mark the anniversary, over the next three ASAB newsletters, we hear from three researchers currently studying animal behaviour at the Visitor Facility.

Roberta Bray, is a PhD student using metabarcoding to identify earthworm species and study aestivation. Roberta tells us a little bit about her project below and how the NEOF has supported her work.

Earthworms are key ecosystem engineers, vital to the functioning of healthy and productive soil, with important roles in the provision of numerous ecosystem services. However, as they require moisture to function, earthworms are potentially threatened by the increased frequency and severity of droughts that are occurring due to climate change. My PhD is investigating aestivation, a survival strategy adopted by some earthworms to prevent desiccation, whereby they curl into a knot, cover themselves in mucous and enter a state of reduced metabolic activity. To determine how the abundance and diversity of aestivating earthworms changes with soil moisture conditions, I am collecting earthworms and moisture readings every month from two UK farms over the course of a year. The aim is to identify which earthworm species aestivate and under which moisture conditions, to gain greater insight into the potential impact of climate change on earthworms, subsequent consequences for soil ecological functioning and thus implications for agriculture. Visual identification of the 29 UK earthworm species using microscopes is restricted to only mature specimen, therefore this project uses molecular analyses of earthworm skin swabs for species determination. Since I had no previous experience of the molecular work or data processing required for this project, I applied to NEOF. I was successful and joined the laboratory where I was taught methods of DNA extraction, quantification, and metabarcoding using primers with unique tags to sequence and identify each earthworm down to the species level. The training and support I have received from NEOF staff has been essential in giving me the laboratory and bioinformatics skills necessary to conduct this project. Group meetings held regularly provide a useful opportunity to hear from other lab members and NEOF visitors working on similar metabarcoding and eDNA projects. I would recommend that anyone who is conducting research on ecology or evolution and thinks their project would benefit from the support, expertise and funding provided by the NEOF Visitor Facility should apply.

5m Book Offer for
ASAB Members

10% off 5m books when you use the code ASAB10

We thought that ASAB members might be particularly interested in the recently published Shadow’s Trip to the Vet, which "involves children in dog ownership by guiding them through the process of taking their family dog to visit the vet.

Claire Corridan promotes both preventative and emergent veterinary care in animals by teaching children how to recognise when their pet is feeling unwell and what to do to help them.”

CABI Book Offer for
ASAB Members

25% off CABI books when you use the code: CCSOC25

We have a range of animal behaviour titles including:

Interacting with Animals: Understanding their Behaviour and Welfare, by Pierre Le Neindre and Bertrand L. Deputte.

Animal behaviour and, as a result, animal welfare are increasingly complex areas of study, with the diversity of the animal kingdom and new research findings ensuring there is no one, easy answer. Instead, we need to take a holistic approach, combining scientific principles with both philosophical and ethical considerations to develop all-inclusive policies and legislation that decide how society should interact with domestic, farm and native animals. This book also raises questions that require further research and focus, such as how animals are likely to act based on their recent and whole-of-life experiences.