Lost and Found: A Science Symposium about Navigation

Two weeks ago, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study at Harvard University held their annual science symposium - this time focusing on the challenging topic of navigation and way-finding. "By bringing together experts in human cognitive neuroscience and neural computation, animal life science, anthropology and culture, space science, current and future technology, and emergency management" the Radcliffe Institute wanted to conduct a broad, cross-disciplinary investigation about way-finding.

One of the speakers was CAnMove's Susanne Åkesson who contributed with the animal navigation aspect - talking about her turtle and albatross research. Watch it here!

The symposium was later written about in both Harvard Gazette and Venitism.

BOU Conference: "Birds in time and space: avian tracking and remote sensing"

This spring conference in Leicester, UK might be of interest to some. The conference will highlight the role of telemetry in understanding the ecology and behaviour of free-living wild birds. March 31st - April 2nd 2015.

Re-launch of Action Group

Today we re-launched the CAnMove Geolocator Action Group! We were an enthusiastic group of 9 CAnMovians, with diverse interests in geolocators/ light-loggers. Our group included people studying swifts, nightjars, great reed-warblers, geese, lapwings, guillemots, great snipes, golden plovers, ... .

Today's meeting was to discuss how we will use the Action Group. Our main decisions were to have a monthly meeting, and to form an email list. Possible themes for future meetings are likely to include, methods to analyse geolocator data, the use of new sensors (accelerometers, wet-dry, etc), and optimal attachment methods for different species.

The email list will be used both to announce upcoming meetings, but also more as a forum where we can share new papers, and ask questions (e.g. 'has anyone used the R package X before?', 'What device would you recommend for use on species Y?')

Our next meeting is to be at either the end of November or beginning of December. This is likely to include both an introduction from one of the companies producing light-loggers (Biotrack), and a short presentation from Tom about how he has been analysing geolocator data for guillemots.

If you would like to join the email list, please email/ talk to Tom Evans.

/Tom

Grants from the Swedish Research Council

Congratulations to CAnMove PIs Christer Brönmark and Bengt Hansson who both got a four-year grant from the Swedish Research Council for their projects: "Defence on demand: procimate processes, personality and parasites" and " Understanding the evolution of sex chromosomes, sex-biased gene expression and sexual antagonism in vertebrates: new insights from a recently discovered neo-sex chromosome in songbirds". To VRs site.