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.

Minisymposium 6 nov: “Genomics and adaptations in diverging populations” and Thesis defence 7th of November

Thursday 6 November 2014 

Location: Red lecture hall, Ecology Building 

14: 00-14: 30 Allison Shultz, Harvard University, USA 

Phylogeography and genomic signatures of pathogen-mediated selection using genome-wide diachronic comparisons in the House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) 

14: 40-15: 10 CAnMove seminar by Kristen Ruegg, University of California, Santa Cruz & Los Angeles. Lessons from population genomics on the Causes and Consequences of migratory connectivity 

15: 20-15: 40 Coffee 

15: 40-16: 10 Bill Cresco, University of Oregon, USA 

Deep genome architecture influences Recent three pine Stickleback evolution 

16: 20-16: 50 Kerstin Johannesson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 

Parallel evolution of snail phenotypes - To What Extent Does molecular evolution repeat itself? 

Friday 7 November 2014 

Location: Blue Lecture Hall, Ecology Building 

09: 30-12: 00 Thesis defense by Max Lundberg, opponent Bill Cresco 

Genomic analyzes of migratory divides in the willow warbler

Photo: Andreas Trepte

Introduction Course for Using Databases , 3 – 7 of November 2014

Geneco will together with CAnMove and PlantLink give a one-week introduction using databases for data mining and storage on 3-7 of November. While the databases can store many different types of data, the examples will be focused on genomics and transcriptomics data and how to efficiently combine results from such large datasets.

 

No previous knowledge of databases is required, but a basic understanding of genomics and/or transcriptomics data is preferable.

 

The week will cover lectures in the morning followed by exercises and will cover the following topics:

1. Introduction to the course book.

2. Relational databases and simple queries (SQL).

3. Introduction to biological databases

4. Creating and populating your own database

5. Advanced SQL queries

6. Database design

 

Possibly we will finish there course by discussing how to create databases for individual projects.

The course will be held at Lund University, Ecology Building.

 

 

Sign up for the course by emailing me: dag.ahren@biol.lu.se

 

Deadline for applying to the course is 20 October.

Bio-logging in Strasbourg

A rather big group of CAnMovians took part in the 5^th Bio-logging Science Symposium, 22-26 September in Strasbourg, France. Susanne Åkesson had a talk about the Common swift studies and Tom Evans (Lesser black-backed gull foraging flight), Jannie Linnebjerg (Brünnich’s guillemot migration) and Götz Eichhorn (Lapwings with geolocators) contributed to the poster sessions. Andreas Nord and Fredrik Andreasson, new PhD student affiliated to CAnMove, dived into the field of body-temperature measurements, (Andreas even co-arranged a workshop on this subject). Johan Bäckman and Arne Andersson from the tech lab sneaked around among the 400 participants and 15 commercial exhibitors to try to figure out what the next innovation in bio-logger design will be.

The bio-logging symposium started off as a meeting ground for marine animal scientists, and the majority of the contributions are still within the field of whales, sharks and seals; animals that can carry huge amounts of sensors without getting problems with over-weight, a luxury situation compared to many of the projects in CAnMove.

There is a strong trend towards using accelerometers on all sorts of animals, either as a proxy for energy expenditure (the acronyms ODBA & VeDBA were heard at numerous occasions) or for monitoring behavior (often in conjunction with other types of sensors such as depth meters and gyroscopes). It seems like many researchers are working hard to designing accurate analysis tools for this kind of data. We will probably have to wait a little longer before good tools for general use are available.

Argos satellite telemetry is still the major backbone for transferring data from the animals to the researchers, although there are some alternatives coming up (e.g. using the mobile phone network).

We also learned that Strasbourg is a charming city and the traditional Alsatian dish Choucroute Garnie is nice but very filling!

//Arne Andersson