Vladimir Pravosudov

Social group membership does not facilitate spatial learning of fine-scale resource locations - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology While many animals use social information to discover novel food sources, the importance of social information availability in the process of learning and remembering specific, fine-scale resource locations remains unclear. Benefits of using social information may vary with an individual’s ability to learn and remember resource locations and environmental conditions. We experimentally tested whether animals use social information from group mates to find and learn resource locations using wild, food-caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli). We tested spatial learning and memory performance by tasking birds with learning the location of one rewarding feeder out of eight using two treatments: (1) birds in the same social group shared the same feeder and (2) social group members had to learn different feeders. We found no evidence that access to social information from close social associates facilitates spatial learning and memory as there were no differences in performance between treatments. Most chickadees used personal information to find their feeder, but there were low and similar rates of social information transmission for both treatments. Our results suggest that chickadees use social information from conspecifics regardless of group membership or familiarity but primarily rely on independent learning and personal information when foraging in a familiar area.

New paper from the lab by Angela Pitera (last chapter of her PhD dissertation!) showing that food-caching chickadees rely on their own spatial memory when learning a spatial task and not on social learning.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

My take on the amazing paper by Hanna Payne and Dmitriy Aronov on activation of hippocampal place codes by gaze in food-caching chickadees.
psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

📢🚨Please share! We’re hiring! 📢🚨Have a strong interests in wildlife ecology and gut microbiome bioinformatics? 3 year Senior Research Associate for NERC Pushing the Frontiers grant. Apply here: vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/18.... Informal enquiries welcome! drgldavidson.github.io/ACMEresearch

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds The fish challenge to vertebrate cognitive evolution

Selection Shapes Animal Minds: More completely free videos of talks from our Royal Society Discussion meeting last year. Today's highlighted talk: Dr Zegni Triki (Neuchatel) @zegnitriki.bsky.social @royalsocietypublishing.org @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social youtu.be/WQLjnfhSyD4?...

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds Mutational origins and selection dynamics of cognitive traits in animals

Selection Shapes Animal Minds: next up in our highlighted talks from last year's Royal Society Discussion Meeting is Michael Sheehan (Cornell) talking about pop gen approaches to the evolution of cognition youtu.be/VIlSj5lwSMQ @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social @royalsocietypublishing.org

Image showing the title of the new paper ("Exploring the Factors Underlying Adaptive Social Plasticity in Foragers Using an Agent-Based Model") published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. Image shows a photo of first author Sanjay Prasher, Hobson Lab and University of Cincinnati logos, and three images of figures from the paper (a flow diagram of the agent-based model, heatmaps showing how social interactions towards a focal individual changed as a function of memory, attention, and social preference, and lineplots showing how group size modulated these effects)

Congratulations Dr. Sanjay Prasher (recent Hobson Lab PhD) on a new publication! We explored how memory, attention, and social preferences affected social plasticity, using an agent-based modeling approach. doi.org/10.1093/icb/... (or message me if you want a pdf!)

Hatch early and eat well: Patterns of juvenile dispersal and recruitment in Mountain Chickadees from a long-term study - American Ornithological Society Being a fledgling is difficult—and dangerous. The vast majority (~80 percent) of young birds do not survive this stage, succumbing to predation or starvation. What might give a vulnerable fledgling a ...

Do you like baby birds? Fun photos and stories about chickadees in my latest guest post at Wing Beat, the blog of the @amornith.bsky.social. This post accompanies our recent paper on postnatal dispersal and recruitment in mountain chickadees 🪶

americanornithology.org/hatch-early-...

Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program (SIFP) node:field_teaser]

The Smithsonian's NMNH is accepting applications for various fellowships for graduate students and postdocs. Projects using NMNH resources are encouraged. For details: https://fellowships.si.edu/SIFP #postdoc

🦜🐣🦢🦉🦃🦤🦩🪶 Can’t wait to share this with everyone!

Mountain chickadees are flexible in their breeding timing - but early breeding is best Animals living in highly variable or changing environments face a challenge: each year, conditions during the reproductive season may be different. Do animals such as mountain chickadees living in har...

Nice blog by @laurenwhitenack.bsky.social about her recent paper on phenological flexibility in mountain chickadees.
communities.springernature.com/posts/mounta...

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Individual repeatability and plasticity of reproductive phenology in a resident montane bird - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Phenological plasticity involves the ability of organisms to adjust the timing of life history events such as reproduction in response to different environmental conditions. Global climate change can ...

New paper from the lab by @laurenwhitenack.bsky.social
Breeding phenology and clutch size were repeatable within individuals, but no strong evidence for clear benefits of phenotypic plasticity in response to climatic variation.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Assistant Professor Online applications must be received before 11:59pm on: September 14, 2025 If a date is not listed above, review the Applicant Instructions below for more details. Available Title(s): 270-NN_FACULTY -...

WSU biology is hiring a vertebrate ecologist! wsu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/WSU_Jo...

Dissecting Factors Behind Temporal Trends in the Timing of Breeding in Two Songbird Species—Evolutionary Change or Phenotypic Plasticity? | The American Naturalist Abstract Warming climate has led to significant phenological advances in many plant and animal populations. Whether these advances represent evolutionary responses or phenotypic plasticity remain typi...

Using long-term data from individually marked songbirds, Vatka et al. discovered that breeding time trends are not attributed to an evolutionary change but phenotypic plasticity.

Read now!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Assistant Professor, Neurobiology - Reno, Nevada (US) job with University of Nevada, Reno - College of Science | 674336 The Department of Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno, is looking for a tenure-track assistant professor to join us starting July 1, 2026. We...

jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/674336/a...

Must cache food

Assistant Professor of Biology The Biology Department at Oberlin College invites applications for a full-time tenure track faculty position in the College of Arts and Sciences in conservation ecology. Initial appointment to this po...

🚨🚨 New tenure track position in #ConservationBiology @oberlincollege.bsky.social in the #Biology department--come join us, and contribute to our brand new Environmental Science major too! #biologyjobs #ecologyjobs

jobs.oberlin.edu/postings/16671

Animal Cognition job at Hunter College CUNY: cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

Adult mountain chickadees are molting heavily - but juveniles look much ‘cleaner’

It’s that time of the year again - nutcrackers are going after pine cones

Social pairing in the absence of reproductive senescence in a socially monogamous songbird Older, more experienced individuals may make better mates than young, inexperienced individuals, but reproductive ability often declines in old ages. Mount

New paper from the lab by @jwelklin.bsky.social
In mountain chickadees, there is positive assortment by age in pairing, but such assortment appears due to pair longevity rather than active mate choice based on age.
academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Schematic of the structure of the paper. We looked at dietary differences between ages and sexes, seasons and habitat types. We looked at the identity of prey in the diet and the number of dietary items.

New publication! 🚨

If you're looking for a paper on what great tits eat then this is for you! 🦋🐛🐞🪲🐦

We looked at variation in diet using DNA metabarcoding and found lots of differences between adult and young birds and between habitat types.
@ucc.ie

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds Cognitive evolution: the mechanisms may be simple but their fine-turning may not be

Today's highlighted talk is a great contribution by Arnon Lotem, discussing the evolution of learning mechanisms and their fine-tuning to fit different species' needs youtu.be/At9uqrPNz5Y @royalsocietypublishing.org @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social

🧪 CRITICAL UPDATE: The House draft version is now out.

✅ Like the Senate's version, there's no cut to NASA's budget.

❌ There's a 23% proposed cut to NSF's budget.

8-page summary: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Draft bill: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

YouTube video by Selection shapes diverse animal minds What is it like to be an octopus?

The next in our series of highlighted talks from our @royalsocietypublishing.org discussion meeting on "Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds" is by Rob Barton (University of Durham): youtu.be/tVqgb0PosHw

Elevation-related differences in annual survival of adult food-caching mountain chickadees are consistent with natural selection on spatial cognition - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Abstract Animals inhabiting montane gradients experience varying winter climates that may result in differential selection on survival-related traits. Higher elevations in temperate climates are chara...

Varies between 0.5 and 0.75 at high elevation. Adult survival is higher at higher elevations because of strong selection on juveniles.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Banded last two chickadee nests of the season at high elevation. In one nest, both parents are 9-years old and bred together for many years. And their nestlings weigh quite a bit more than the average. In chickadees, older patents raise higher quality offspring. Here is 9-yr old female