Plenary speakers
Prof Sigrunn Eliassen (University of Bergen)
Emotions and decision-making
Sigrunn Eliassen is a Professor in Evolutionary Ecology at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen, Norway. She is also an Excellent Teaching Practitioner with special interest in research-based teaching and is currently Vice Dean of Education at the Science faculty. Sigrunn’s research focuses on the evolution of mating systems and cooperative behaviours. Using evolutionary modelling, she studies how mating strategies change the incentives of males and females to invest in parental care and cooperation within a group. She is also interested in how animals use information and learn. With colleagues, she has studied mechanisms of decision-making and developed a new framework for behavioural modelling.
Prof Stephanie King (University of Bristol)
Cooperation in bottlenose dolphins
Stephanie King is an Associate Professor in Animal Behaviour at the University of Bristol where she heads the cetacean communication and cognition research group. She was extensive experience designing and implementing ambitious field-based experiments to study animal social cognition in the wild. Stephanie's primary research focus is on the evolution of complex communication systems and cooperative strategies in bottlenose dolphins, and she is the principal investigator of Shark Bay Dolphin Research, a 40-year study on dolphin behavioural ecology.
Prof Tom Tregenza (University of Exeter)
Selection on insect behaviour in the wild
Tom Tregenza is a Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall. His research is about how natural and sexual selection operate in the wild. For the last 15 years most of this research has been based in the WildCrickets meadow, which he has developed to study selection on the behaviour and life-histories of an insect in its natural habitat. The approach is to individually mark every cricket in the population and then observe every detail of their adult lives using a network of ~140 infra-red CCTV cameras. Observations of matings, fights, predation events and so-on are combined with DNA fingerprinting of subsequent generations to measure fitness consequences of behaviours and life-history strategies. WildCrickets has provided insights into why females mate with so many males, how even short-lived insects senesce as they age and how selection varies among years.
Dr Nobuaki Mizumoto (Auburn University)
Christopher Barnard Award Winner
Evolutionary perspectives of termite collective behavior
Nobuaki Mizumoto is a new Assistant Professor in Insect Ecology at the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at Auburn University, starting January 2024. He studies nest construction and movement coordination in termites to ask how collective-level phenomena are regulated by individual-level behaviors and how behavioral coordination has evolved in the history of life. His research is based on detailed behavioral observations and the life history of each termite species but extends the analysis to multiple species in a phylogenetic context to understand their environmental adaptation and evolutionary process.
Coffee meet-ups
Chats with members of the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, Exeter
During the morning coffee breaks (24th and 25th April), conference participants have opportunity to meet some of the researchers of the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at Exeter. If you would like to have a chat over coffee with any of the CRAB members listed below, then send us an email with the subject “ASAB Spring 2024 coffee meetup", telling us which members you’d like to chat with. We expect that each member will attend one of these meet-ups during the conference, with everyone who expressed an interest in meeting them.
