I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Elizabeth Hobson, a biology professor at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Hobson and her lab study social structure and animal behavior. In our interview, we discussed her current research and her job as a biologist.
Would you like to briefly explain what you study?
I study the intersection between animal sociality and cognition. Animal cognition is hard to study; it’s really hard to figure out what’s going on in animal brains. So what I do is look at the social side and see what they’re doing, and then try to figure out what they would have to know on the cognitive side in order to act in these ways. It’s a back-and-forth between what you can see and what you have to figure out might be going on. It’s fun—there’s a lot of social drama!
What research projects are you currently working on?
One of our main research projects is a parakeet project. We put them in social groups in semi-natural captive environments—big outdoor flight pens—and we let the social structure solidify and stabilize. Then we go in and identify the top-ranked bird in the dominance hierarchy, and we trap that bird and remove it from the group, and we ask ‘how does the group recover?’ Then, 8 days later, we put that bird back in, and look at how that bird reintegrates back into the group and what the group does when that bird suddenly reappears.
What does this tell you about the bird’s cognition?
It tells us a little bit about memory, but mainly it tells us how they’re using and understanding their rank and the rank of others in their group. For example, a lot of fish have size-based dominance hierarchies where the big fish are the ‘big fish’ and can win against everybody else. In that case, the rank is really coming out of the characteristics of the individual, and you could interchange the individual. If you take out one big fish and put in another big fish things are going to be pretty much the same.
If it was just the bird’s own characteristics that allowed it to achieve a particular rank, a top-ranked bird that you take out should be top-ranked when you put it back in. But what we’re finding is that it rejoins the hierarchy at the bottom or nearly the bottom. All of the birds act like ‘we know you, and you’re not top-ranked anymore’ and they bully it. This gives us insight into both their memory, that they remember this individual, but also that the individuals in the group want to hang on to their own rank and are not allowing this bird to just come back in and retake the top position. It seems like the history matters a lot; it matters who you interacted with recently and how those interactions went, which makes it a really interesting cognitive system.
How do you conduct your field research?
We have to be able to recognize the parakeets, and they all look the same. So, we catch them all and we give them a unique color combination, which we draw all over their faces. For example, they could get a color combination of red on the head, purple on the cheeks, and orange on the neck. That color combination becomes that bird’s name, and that's the only bird with the combination. This allows us to see who exactly did what in all of the social interactions.
After we mark them all up, we release them into big outdoor flight pens, and then we take data on iPads. We try to collect as much of the social drama as possible. They fight all of the time; they’re very feisty. But they’re also very cute; they preen each other. We try to capture all of those interactions. On the iPad, we touch the bird that’s doing something to the other bird and drag it to the bird that they’re doing it to, and then we put in the behavioral type. Then we have all of the data in an electronic format, so we can analyze it.
Two of Dr. Hobson’s PhD students marking one of the parakeets
What do you do with the data you collect?
We want to see how frequently two birds are interacting. A step before that is figuring out which birds in the group are actually interacting. In some groups, we have everybody interacting with everybody, but in some groups, we have loner birds that don’t interact as much. We want to see how many birds each other one is interacting with, and how many times they are interacting with each other. From all of that, we can start to build social networks to see who is connected with who.
Then from there, we can do the rank measurements. We use a network-based rank measurement to see what the ranks of all of the individuals are in a way that is dependent both on how much they’re aggressive—how much they’re fighting—but also who they are fighting with. In the way that we analyze rank, it’s not enough to just be the one who wins the most fights over anybody, it matters who you fight with. We have one group this year where the top two birds are actually not the most aggressive in the group, it’s the third and fourth-ranked birds that are the most aggressive and fight the most. But they never win against the top two birds, and the top two birds always win against them. This indicates why the identity of the individuals in the fights really matters.
About The Author
Marcella is a Senior at Northwood High School who is interested in a career as a Conservation Biologist. She enjoys reading, playing the piano, and being outside.
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