Two of the monk parakeets allopreening each other. This is an example of the many social interactions Dr. Hobson and her lab look for.
Do the birds know what rank they are?
That’s a good question; we were wondering that too because they fight a lot—they seem to spend a lot of energy on being aggressive. It would be a good idea, if you’re spending that much time doing something, to understand what you’re trying to achieve so that you know when you’ve achieved it.
You can imagine a top-ranked bird, if it's super aggressive in the beginning, once it achieves top rank it might not have to continue being aggressive. But it needs to know that it’s achieved top rank in order to have that change in behavior. So we can look for things like that, and see if the birds changed their behavior over time once the hierarchy stabilized and if aggression decreases once everybody knows what their ranks are.
Another way we can figure this out is to look at not just the ranks of the individuals, but how they’re focussing their aggression on a particular part of the hierarchy. Sometimes they do this thing that we call ‘close competitor aggression,’ which is where each bird will fight with the birds that are ranked slightly below themselves. They’re really specializing on who they’re attacking in the fights. That gives us an indication that they know where their rank is in the hierarchy—so they’re not attacking the birds that are ranked above them—and they know the relative ranks of all of the birds that are below them in the hierarchy—because they are able to choose to not fight with the birds that are at the bottom of the hierarchy. We think they are doing that because the ones that are ranked slightly below a particular bird might be the potential challengers for the bird's own rank. They might be more aggressive towards those potential challengers to keep them in line and keep them below themselves in the rank.
Have you worked with any other species besides the parakeets?
Yeah, also in the lab we have a Northern Bobwhite Quail study system. One of my students is doing a lot of social experiments with them. We put groups of strangers in an indoor flight pen and let them run around and interact in there. We take data on an iPad, just like we do for the parakeets, and we see who they’re fighting with, who they’re forming friendship-like relationships with, and what their social structure looks like when they don’t know each other to start with. That’s been a fun series of experiments to get started. With them, we’re kind of starting at zero; we don’t really know what they’re going to do. We think probably they’re going to form a dominance hierarchy, and it looks like they do. It’s exciting to start with a new species and just say ‘Let’s figure stuff out, what do these guys do?’
We’re almost ready to work with beta fish in the lab, which is going to be really fun because they’re super aggressive. They’re really cool because they can recognize each other by sight, and they fight really well through a glass barrier. We’re going to do some really fun experiments with aggression and individual recognition with them.
I have side projects on ants, cicadas, lots of different parrot species, humans, and vampire bat cooperation—that’s a really fun one! It's been fun to go from aggression, hierarchies, and rank over to friendliness, cooperation, and keeping each other alive. It's like two sides of almost the same coin—cooperation and conflict.
What is your favorite part of your job?
The creativity of everything. The way that I was taught about science and scientists, was that it was a very logical type of profession and that if you were creative, you should go and be an artist or a writer. I think that’s completely wrong about how science works; you really have to be such a creative person to think of new ideas and creatively think of ways to bridge the gaps in our scientific understanding that haven’t been bridged before. We’re always trying to do new projects and get new understanding into things, and trying to figure out how to do that is so hard and requires so much brainpower and so much creative spark. I think that’s definitely my favorite part: brainstorming new ideas and getting new insight into things.
What advice would you give to a high schooler interested in a career as a biologist?
The sooner that you can learn how to do your analyses, especially coding, the better. I didn’t realize until halfway through grad school that this was going to be a thing that I was going to need to do, and I really had to sit down with myself and be like “oh gosh, if I want to continue my research in the direction that I want to go in, I’m going to have to learn how to code.” I had no background in it whatsoever, and I really had to start from scratch, which was really scary. It definitely worked; that changed my career. I think for today’s students, the earlier you can get exposure to coding, the better because it's so important for getting a job—any kind of STEM job these days, there’s more and more analysis that’s expected from everybody.
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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