Last Saturday saw myself and some other Stirling-based researchers brave the resurgent snow to travel across to St. Andrews University for 2011’s Scottish Conference of Animal Behaviour (SCAB). This was a really great meeting, being small but still covering a variety of fields – my university was represented not only by attendees from ecology and evolutionary biology, but also from the psychology department, some of whom work in conjunction with the Living Links research station at Edinburgh Zoo.

The talks were all of a very high standard, and I had to prevent myself from exploding in a fit of jealous rage at some of the research being undertaken. Thibaud Gruber kicked things off in this vein, showing some fantastic videos of chimps singularly failing to learn how to use sticks to get at honey he’d secreted in holes in logs. My personal favourite was the experiment in which he actually placed the stick into the hole, only for a chimp to remove it, lick the honey from it, and then throw the stick away in favour of scrabbling around with its fingers and rolled-up leaves. As with all research, the combination of excitement and frustration was palpable…

Bonus video – chimps using sticks to ‘fish’ for termites:

Paris Veltsos of St Andrews gave a talk that was of great interest to me, discussing courtship song and cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs) in populations of Drosophila montana. Veltsos and his collaborators found that various factors outside simply courtship effort contribute to net selection on song; they also saw differences in CHC selection between the two populations. I had a quick chat with Paris after the end of the meeting, and am looking forward to reading the paper that comes from this work (which I shall then review here).

There were also excellent talks on fish, including one which resulted in the lecturer driving us back to Stirling devising a project that should enable him to sit and watch the Tour de France all summer as ‘research’; another from the University of Glasgow’s Amy Schwartz, on sexual selection in guppies, made tantalising references to ‘Nature’s Laboratory’ in Trinidad. I bit my knuckles as I thought of the stark walls of my two controlled temperature labs. Perhaps I should put some posters up in there.

While I remained under no illusions as to the lack of romance in the laboratory setting of my work, I was clinging to the last vestiges of my pride by thinking, well, my crickets are kinda cute…

…and then came the presentations based on work using the rufous hummingbird.

I’m not sure even the most charismatic of my cricket hordes can really compete with that.

Still, there was to be a final sting in the tail – my friend Ros Murray, also working in the sexual selection lab at Stirling, won the prize for best student presentation. This was no mean feat, considering both the standard of the talks on show and the fact that she was discussing her work on sperm competition in the microscopic nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. It was a great talk, and covered some really elegant work that included the use of GFP (green flourescent protein) as a marker that was passed to the next generation by the ‘winning’ sire, clearly indicating to which of the competing males the offspring belonged. The award also comes after finding that this work has been accepted for publication in BMC Evolution journal, which is really excellent news. She probably deserves the reward after the mockery she’d put up with from some of us over her tiny, tiny worm sperm going head-to-head with monkeys and hummingbirds…