SICB Division of Animal Behavior (DAB)





Proposed Division of Animal Behavior bylaws amendments



Winners of DAB’s 2019 Marlene Zuk and Elizabeth Adkins-Regan Awards

Thank you to all of the students who participated in our 2019 Marlene Zuk and Elizabeth Adkins-Regan competitions! With 45 student competitors and 50 judges across our Zuk and Adkins-Regan competitions, much of our division was involved in these competitions, and we are very proud of this high level of participation. We had a fantastic Marlene Zuk Best Student Presentation Session with seven finalists giving excellent oral presentations to a packed room, as well an impressive 29 students competing for the Elizabeth Adkins-Regan Award for Best Student Poster.

The Marlene Zuk Award for best oral presentation went to Jenna Pruett for her talk titled, “Maternal nest choice and the effects of nest microclimate on egg survival in the brown anole”. Jenna is a PhD student in Dr. Dan Warner’s lab at Auburn University where she studies nesting behavior and maternal effects in reptiles. Her work on the effects of nesting behavior started in painted turtles and has moved to brown anoles. She hopes to characterize anole nesting behavior and its effects on embryo development, particularly under natural field conditions.

The Elizabeth Adkins-Regan award went to Erin Giglio for her poster entitled, “Context in courtship: the role of leptin in social investment decisions in singing mice.” Erin Giglio is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin working in the lab of Steven Phelps. Her research focuses on the integration of social and energetic context into decisions about effort investment in social signaling behavior, particularly in Alston’s singing mice (Scotinomys teguina). She is particularly interested in the hormone leptin, which shows promise as a potential indicator of overall energetic context. In the study she presented, singing mice injected with leptin produced more songs in response to playback trials than singing mice injected with saline, as well as songs that scored higher on a measure of effort derived from a study of wild-caught singing mice. This was true despite no manipulation of animals involved. Erin’s research is currently hosted at phelpslab.net.

Many congratulations to our two winners, and a big thank you to all of the judges who helped evaluate the student talks and posters!



Meetings