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LOGAN CorinaORCID_LOGO

  • Comparative Behavioral Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
  • Behaviour & Ethology, Preregistrations, Zoology
  • recommender

Recommendations:  2

Reviews:  0

Areas of expertise
My BS degree is in biology from the Evergreen State College in the US where I studied play behavior in coatis (a raccoon relative). I started research in comparative cognition during my PhD as a Gates Scholar in Nicola Clayton’s lab at the University of Cambridge where I investigated how three species in the crow family solve social problems. I discovered that even the most solitary species studied so far uses social support after fights. As a SAGE Junior Research Fellow at the University of California Santa Barbara, I expanded this research to investigate the role of behavioral flexibility in cognition. I used a National Geographic Society/Waitt Grant to establish a field site to study behavioral flexibility across species with different brain sizes. I found that smaller-brained great-tailed grackles are as behaviorally flexible as large-brained New Caledonian crows. As a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, I used quantitative genetics to investigate what social, ecological, and genetic factors are associated with intra-species variation in brain size in 1,300 red deer from a long-term study in Scotland. From the end of my Leverhulme Fellowship and now as a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, I am investigating what behavioral flexibility is and whether it is a mechanism for surviving in new environments in rapidly expanding species (grackles and humans).

Recommendations:  2

24 Nov 2023
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Consistent individual positions within roosts in Spix's disc-winged bats

Consistent individual differences in habitat use in a tropical leaf roosting bat

Recommended by based on reviews by Annemarie van der Marel and 2 anonymous reviewers

Consistent individual differences in habitat use are found across species and can play a role in who an individual mates with, their risk of predation, and their ability to compete with others (Stuber et al. 2022). However, the data informing such hypotheses come primarily from temperate regions (Stroud & Thompson 2019, Titley et al. 2017). This calls into question the generalizability of the conclusions from this research until further investigations can be conducted in tropical regions.

Giacomini and colleagues (2023) tackled this task in an investigation of consistent individual differences in habitat use in the Central American tropics. They explored whether Spix’s disc-winged bats form positional hierarchies in roosts, which is an excellent start to learning more about the social behavior of this species - a species that is difficult to directly observe. They found that individual bats use their roosting habitat in predictable ways by positioning themselves consistently either in the bottom, middle, or top of the roost leaf. Individuals chose the same positions across time and across different roost sites. They also found that age and sex play a role in which sections individuals are positioned in.

Their research shows that consistent individual differences in habitat use are present in a tropical system, and sets the stage for further investigations into social behavior in this species, particularly whether there is a dominance hierarchy among individuals and whether some positions in the roost are more protective and sought after than others.

References

Giacomini G, Chaves-Ramirez S, Hernandez-Pinson A, Barrantes JP, Chaverri G. (2023). Consistent individual positions within roosts in Spix's disc-winged bats. bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.04.515223 

Stroud, J. T., & Thompson, M. E. (2019). Looking to the past to understand the future of tropical conservation: The importance of collecting basic data. Biotropica, 51(3), 293-299. https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.12665

Stuber, E. F., Carlson, B. S., & Jesmer, B. R. (2022). Spatial personalities: a meta-analysis of consistent individual differences in spatial behavior. Behavioral Ecology, 33(3), 477-486. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arab147 

Titley, M. A., Snaddon, J. L., & Turner, E. C. (2017). Scientific research on animal biodiversity is systematically biased towards vertebrates and temperate regions. PloS one, 12(12), e0189577. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189577

11 Aug 2023
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Implementing Code Review in the Scientific Workflow: Insights from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

A handy “How to” review code for ecologists and evolutionary biologists

Recommended by based on reviews by Serena Caplins and 1 anonymous reviewer

Ivimey Cook et al. (2023) provide a concise and useful “How to” review code for researchers in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, where the systematic review of code is not yet standard practice during the peer review of articles. Consequently, this article is full of tips for authors on how to make their code easier to review. This handy article applies not only to ecology and evolutionary biology, but to many fields that are learning how to make code more reproducible and shareable. Taking this step toward transparency is key to improving research rigor (Brito et al. 2020) and is a necessary step in helping make research trustable by the public (Rosman et al. 2022).

References

Brito, J. J., Li, J., Moore, J. H., Greene, C. S., Nogoy, N. A., Garmire, L. X., & Mangul, S. (2020). Recommendations to enhance rigor and reproducibility in biomedical research. GigaScience, 9(6), giaa056. https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giaa056

Ivimey-Cook, E. R., Pick, J. L., Bairos-Novak, K., Culina, A., Gould, E., Grainger, M., Marshall, B., Moreau, D., Paquet, M., Royauté, R., Sanchez-Tojar, A., Silva, I., Windecker, S. (2023). Implementing Code Review in the Scientific Workflow: Insights from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. EcoEvoRxiv, ver 5 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community In Ecology. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2CG64

Rosman, T., Bosnjak, M., Silber, H., Koßmann, J., & Heycke, T. (2022). Open science and public trust in science: Results from two studies. Public Understanding of Science, 31(8), 1046-1062. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625221100686

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LOGAN CorinaORCID_LOGO

  • Comparative Behavioral Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
  • Behaviour & Ethology, Preregistrations, Zoology
  • recommender

Recommendations:  2

Reviews:  0

Areas of expertise
My BS degree is in biology from the Evergreen State College in the US where I studied play behavior in coatis (a raccoon relative). I started research in comparative cognition during my PhD as a Gates Scholar in Nicola Clayton’s lab at the University of Cambridge where I investigated how three species in the crow family solve social problems. I discovered that even the most solitary species studied so far uses social support after fights. As a SAGE Junior Research Fellow at the University of California Santa Barbara, I expanded this research to investigate the role of behavioral flexibility in cognition. I used a National Geographic Society/Waitt Grant to establish a field site to study behavioral flexibility across species with different brain sizes. I found that smaller-brained great-tailed grackles are as behaviorally flexible as large-brained New Caledonian crows. As a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, I used quantitative genetics to investigate what social, ecological, and genetic factors are associated with intra-species variation in brain size in 1,300 red deer from a long-term study in Scotland. From the end of my Leverhulme Fellowship and now as a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, I am investigating what behavioral flexibility is and whether it is a mechanism for surviving in new environments in rapidly expanding species (grackles and humans).