It’s not just what you have but how you use it – Continuing the story of my dissertation

A little less than two years ago, I wrote a guest blog post for the Oxford University Press about my first dissertation chapter. I just realized, however, that I did not end up writing follow up posts on my other dissertation chapters. Therefore, I decided, both as a way to get back into blogging and to continue the story of my dissertation, I will write a blog post for each of my other dissertation chapters, with another post or two on how the work has continued since my dissertation.

First, a brief reminder of where the story of my dissertation began. I was interested in understanding the diversity and evolution of hummingbird iridescent coloration and courtship dances. I was particularly excited to study how male hummingbirds used their dances and the environment to manipulate their angle-dependent iridescent coloration.

Throughout my work, I termed these color manipulation events as “signal interactions” because the behavioral signals, color signals, and the environment in which the signaling took place were all interacting with each other to produce how males appeared to females during courtship. I also used the term “male color appearance during displays” or “color appearance” for short to describe this signal interaction product. To provide a little more context and examples, though my first dissertation chapter, I found that some male hummingbirds use their behaviors and the environment to manipulate their iridescent feathers to create a flashy, strobe-like color appearance. Think of someone dancing in a sequin outfit – when they move about, their outfit will sparkle and flash, which is similar to what some hummingbirds do. Other hummingbirds maintain a very consistent color appearance during courtship. In other words, they behaviorally and environmentally manipulate their iridescent coloration to not change color as they dance.

A male Costa’s hummingbird dancing for a female.

In addition to finding this variation in male color appearance during displays, I also wanted to understand what exactly was driving that variation. One of the main findings from my first chapter was that how males oriented towards the sun greatly influenced their color appearance. Some males tended to face away from the sun as they courted females, and these males tended to have the consistent color appearances. Other males tended to face towards the sun as they courted females, and these males tended to have the flashy color appearances. There were also multiple aspects of each male’s display that influenced their color appearance, such as how they oriented towards the female as they danced. Also, all of the work for my first chapter was on broad-tailed hummingbirds.

Broad-tailed hummingbird male, photo taken by me

So, the main findings from my first chapter were 1) male hummingbirds use courtship dances and the environment to manipulate their iridescent plumage to produce two types of color appearances for females – flashy color appearances and consistent color appearances; and 2) male hummingbirds vary in how they orient towards the sun as they dance for females, which in turn predicts their color appearance.

For my second chapter, which I published in Ecology Letters in 2018, I wanted to better understand how male iridescent plumage, courtship dances, and the environment were interacting to produce male color appearance. Did one or more of those traits play a stronger role in the production of color appearance? For example, did males with brighter and more colorful plumage appear brighter and more colorful? Or could males with any sort of plumage be able to achieve a variety of color appearances through their dances? These were the questions I aimed to study going into my second dissertation chapter. For this work, I shifted to a different hummingbird species, the Costa’s hummingbird.

A male Costa’s hummingbird, photo taken by me.

Costa’s hummingbirds are desert specialists, unlike the high elevation broad-tailed hummingbirds, and Costa’s hummingbirds are very abundant in southern California, where I studied them. I used the same field techniques as I did for my first chapter. I used caged females to elicit and film male courtship dances (second video). I captured those males who danced and collected a few feathers from them. I used video tracking software to map male movements and plumage orientations towards the sun and female during courtship dances. And finally, I used a tool I built, which I called the lazy Susan apparatus, to take male feathers and move them through a re-created male courtship dance and quantify the appearance of those feathers as they moved through the dance.

My filming set up – a caged female used to elicit male dances, with my camera filming from below. Note – I had all required permits for this research and no hummingbirds were harmed. All hummingbirds were released after capture.

My lazy Susan apparatus that allowed me to move hummingbird feathers, which were taped on to the wooden block, through a male’s recreated display. I also could turn the block, which was on the lazy Susan swivel to mimic how the male oriented himself towards the female. I would then photograph the feathers using a special full-spectrum DSLR camera from the female’s point of view.

Altogether, I had data on male courtship dance behaviors, solar orientation, and color appearance, just as I did for my first chapter. However, in this chapter I made two major additions. Firstly, I had a much higher sample size, meaning I filmed more courtship dances from more males, which allowed me to do more complex statistical analyses. And secondly, I took those plucked feathers and also took objective color measurements of the feathers outside of their behavioral and environmental contexts. In other words, instead of only measuring color appearance during a display, I took standardized measurements of feather color. Namely, I measured feather reflectance using a spectrometer. This allowed me to test whether males with innately more colorful or brighter feathers appeared more colorful or brighter during their display. Also, because iridescent feathers change color depending on the angles in which they are illuminated or observed, I used the spectrometer to measure how angle-dependent each male’s feathers were. This allowed me to test whether males with more angle-dependent feathers appeared flashier during their displays.

Using all of these data, I created a series of statistical models that tested the predictive influence of male courtship dances, feather reflectance, and solar orientation on male color appearance – both in terms of flashiness and how bright and colorful males appeared on average. First, I should note that unlike male broad-tailed hummingbirds, which exhibited a large variation in how they oriented towards the sun, nearly all male Costa’s hummingbirds faced the sun as they displayed.

Boyd Deep Canyon, in Southern California, where I studied male Costa’s hummingbirds, photo taken by me.

Okay, back to my models. I found that while all three signaling traits – feather reflectance, behavior, and the sun – predicted variation I male color appearance, but variation in male behavior and especially solar orientation were much stronger predictors of color appearance than feather reflectance. To me this was very exciting, because it meant that even the males who had drabber plumage to begin with were able to behaviorally and environmentally manipulate their iridescent coloration to appear bright, colorful, and flashy. This finding lead to my cheeky paper title – “It’s not just what you have, but how you use it.”

These results have large implications for understanding color signaling in general. Many researchers who study how animals use color as a signal, such as to attract males (like the hummingbirds) or to ward off predators or rivals, measure the color of a given animal outside of their behavioral and environmental contexts. In other words, they use a spectrometer, or something similar, to measure color reflectance, as I did in the lab. However, my results here demonstrate that knowing color reflectance does not tell the whole story. In fact, it might not even be telling any story, because of how animals, like my hummingbirds, can manipulate their color to change how it appears. My big hope for color signal research going forward is that researchers focus more on how animals are behaviorally using their colorful signals and how these signals are interacting with the environment, which I believe will go a long way into helping us understand why and how animals use color to communicate.

Costa’s hummingbird male in hand.

Here is the full citation for my second dissertation chapter, which again was published in Ecology Letters:

Simpson, RK, McGraw, KJ. 2018. It’s not just what you have, but how you use it: solar-positional and behavioural effects on hummingbird colour appearance during courtship. Ecology Letters, 21: 1413-1422. PDF

Next time, I will write about my third dissertation chapter, which builds upon my first two chapters by comparing male hummingbird signals and signal interactions across species. More soon!

What is a post-doc? And what am I doing as one?

It has been quite some time since I last wrote a blog post, and I decided that for my first post back, I would talk about my current position in academia: a post-doctoral fellow. When I last checked in, I posted that I was moving to Canada and starting a post-doctoral position in Dr. Stephanie Doucet’s lab. But what is a post-doctoral position, or post-doc for short? Well a post-doc is an in-between phase, where I am no longer a graduate student, but I am also not yet a professor. Due to the small number of available academic jobs each year, people who finish their PhDs often do not get professor positions right out of grad school. Instead we take up research focused positions in, typically, another lab, where we learn new techniques, ask new questions, and/or expand our previous work. Post-docs do not usually have to teach, so we have much more time to conduct research and write, which is a huge benefit for being a post-doc. We are also much more independent and are often semi-autonomous with our work. A post-doc was once described to me as a time to conduct another dissertation on a shorter time scale (1-3 years), but with all the knowledge and experience from grad school helping streamline and expatiate the research process.

There are two mains types of post-doc positions. The first is where you write a fellowship, for example through the National Science Foundation or the Cornell Lab of Ornithology post-doctoral fellowship. Some consider this type of post-doc ideal, because you join a lab with your own money and are conducting your project, not helping/conducting your advisor’s project(s). While this freedom is definitely a boon, the other type of post-doc is no less ideal. For the second type of post-doc, you join a lab on the PI’s, or principle investigator’s, money. This typically means that you are conducting research on an already established project or grant proposal and might have less freedom to do whatever you want, research-topic-wise. However, these post-docs can be quite ideal positions as well, because you can have more structure to be productive, and the position “forces” you to learn new techniques/study-systems/research ideas, which can help you further develop as a scientist. Now, the fellowship-type post-doc also provides plenty of opportunities for you to learn new things as well, so I would say neither is necessarily better than the other. It really just depends on the lab you join, your advisor, the source of funding, and YOU, which can result in a plethora of different experiences.

My post-doc is the second type of post-doc, where I joined a lab on my advisor’s funding. There were many reasons I took up this position over others. Firstly, my wife and I were both looking for post-docs, which is a difficult situation to be in as it is hard enough to find one post-doc, and the post-docs we both found were only 2 hours apart, so we could live together as I commuted to work (which is only twice a week currently). Secondly, it was one of my post-doc advisor’s papers that inspired my entire dissertation, so it is really awesome to be working with the person who had that level of influence on my research. And thirdly, I am able to work on several different projects with Stephanie, allowing me to expand my research along multiple avenues. Overall I am very lucky to have found such a great position and advisor!

Pine Warbler

There are three main research thrusts for my post-doc. The first is a continuation of some work I started during my dissertation, which is to conduct electron microscopy on hummingbird feathers to study and quantify the surface and internal structures of their iridescent feathers. Electron microscopy is a technique that allows me to look at feathers as a very, very small scale, much smaller than your typical light microscope, and allows me to look at the micro- and nano-structures in the feather that interact with light to produce the brilliant colors we see in hummingbird feathers. This project is another reason I wanted to work with Stephanie, as she has conducted this type of work in the past.

The second project I am conducting is a continuation of a project Stephanie and her former master’s student (Allison) started several years ago. We are working to understand the evolution of wood-warbler plumage coloration. First, we tested how variation in breeding habitat, nest predation, outside of pair matings (males/females copulate with individuals that are not their social mate to acquire additional offspring), and other related variables to understand how sexual and natural selection are working simultaneously to drive color evolution. This part of the project is actually already written up and will hopefully be submitted for publication soon! We are also working to understand how species range overlap (how much each specie’s range overlaps with another species’ range) predicts color evolution, with the idea being that the more you overlap with other species, the more different your plumage color will be compared to those overlapping species. This part of the project is allowing me to learn several new comparative statistics techniques, which I am thoroughly enjoying!

Finally, the third research project of my post-doc is working with local vineyards to help them both better prevent birds from eating all of their grapes and to evaluate grape ripeness using color. This is a more applied research project, which is great for me, because it is a new opportunity to study questions of color function and evolution in an entirely new context. We will be starting this project later this year, so we are still in the development stages of it, but I am excited to see what happens!

I hope that that this post was both informative about what post-docs are and provided you with an update about the research I am currently conducting. I am excited about all of the new opportunities I have been granted through working with Stephanie, and I have also been fortunate to have many opportunities to interact with a diversity of other research labs both at my university, University of Windsor, and my wife’s university, University of Western Ontario. Overall, I have had a great start to my post-doc and hope to have many more exciting updates in the future!

I moved to Canada!

I am excited to announce that my wife and I just completed our move to Canada to start our new post-docs this week! I will be working with Stephanie Doucet at the University of Windsor. I will be continuing to study the evolution of coloration in birds, but in collaboration with Stephanie and her husband, Dan Mennill, I will also be studying the co-evolution of color and song. This is particularly exciting for me as I am interested in studying multiple signals and while hummingbirds and many other birds/animals communicate using elaborate dances and ornate color patches, they also signal in other modalities like acoustic or odor signals. Additionally, I will continue to study the mechanisms of color production in hummingbirds using electron microscopy. I will be looking at the surface and internal structures of hummingbird feathers to understand how these structures co-evolved with their feather reflectance, color appearance during displays, and courtship dances.

In the meantime, my recent publication from my dissertation in Ecology Letters picked up some popular press! I was interviewed by a writer from Science for their news section, and they both wrote an article about my paper and created a really neat video! Be sure to check them out!

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/trick-snagging-hummingbird-chick-good-lighting

Concluding my Peru trip

With everything that has been going on (defense, moving, etc.), I realize that I have fallen way behind with my blogging! So here is the final update from my Peru field trip, I hope you enjoy!

Some of the snow-capped volcanoes around Arequipa

For the last leg of my Peru trip, I journeyed to Southern Peru, specifically to the area around Arequipa, which was a Spanish colonial city nested in a valley around several volcanoes. Here I had pretty good success working with two of my target hummingbird species – Peruvian sheartail (video of display, side video) and oasis hummingbird (video of display, side video).

A male oasis hummingbird (Thaumastura vesper; formerly Rhodopis vesper)

A Peruvian sheartail male (Thaumastura cora)

I stayed at a wonderful hotel outside of the city, which was great because I could walk to one of my field sites that was just outside of town. At this field site, along many farm plots, wound a creek along some desert hills. It was among these hills and the creek bed where I found both species holding territories and displaying.

A Peruvian sheartail perching in his territory

My other field site was about 2 hours away from town, along another riverbed, but in a much more desert-based habitat, as you can see from these pictures.

At this field site, I was looking for the elusive purple-collared woodstar, and while I never was able to work with them, I found some additional oasis hummingbirds. The best part about this field site, is that I caught an oasis hummingbird male with my bare hand!! It was hanging out near the female in her cage, as in the blow photos, and I just quickly pinned it against the cage and was able to capture it. (it was not hurt in any way!) So that was an awesome moment for me in my research.

Overall, I loved the area around Arequipa. It was a beautiful place, surrounded by these snow-capped volcanoes, and the people were very friendly. I had a great time working with my wonderful field assistant, Carla Llerena Quiroz, and visiting the university/museum of my collaborator, Mauricio Ugarte at El Museo de Historia Natural de la Universidad Nacional San Augustin, where I gave a seminar for them. All in all, this leg of my trip was very successful, and I then returned to the US to begin analyzing those data I collected and wrapping up my dissertation. More on all that in the future, so for now, here are a few additional photos from highlights of my Arequipa trip:

A Peruvian sheartail nest

The awkward way we have to drive with our mist-net poles to the field (we drove like this for over an hour).

The famous giant hummingbird (Patagona gigas), which can weigh up to 25 grams!

The super barren desert around Arequipa, which makes the deserts around Phoenix look like lush tropical rainforests in comparison.

 

 

My Oxford University Press blog guest-post about my first chapter!

Well, I’m back from Peru and busily trying to wrap up my dissertation. While I will definitely write a final Peru blog post in the near future, I also recently wrote a guest blog post for Oxford University Press blog about my first dissertation chapter titled, “How do male hummingbird dance moves alter their appearance?” published in Behavioral Ecology. This chapter is titled “Two ways to display: male hummingbirds show different color-display tactics based on sun orientation,” and tests how broad-tailed hummingbirds orient towards the sun as they dance and how their sun orientation alters what they look like. I hope you enjoy the post and paper, and please let me know if you have any questions about the study!

Also check out this .gif they made for me from one of my YouTube videos.

Back to Peru!

That’s right, I am back in Peru right now studying hummingbirds. I know, it is a bit crazy for me to be gathering data the semester I plan to graduate, but I got a grant to travel to Peru, and I am not about to say no to that!

Anyways, this trip to Peru is much more structured than last time. Last time, I was scouting the country and searching for field sites. Now that I have field sites, I am staying those places for longer periods of time. Right now, I am in Northern Peru three weeks. I am currently staying at the Center for the Spectacled Bear Conservation Society (SBC), in a small town called Batangrande. It is a family run field station that is near the Andes Mountains and in the tropical dry forests unique to this region (called Tumbes). It is also a great location to study two species of hummingbirds: short-tailed woodstar (Myrmia micrura) and purple-collared woodstar (Myrtis fanny).

A short-tailed woodstar male.

So far, things are going well. I have found territories of multiple males for both species, including over 10 territories for the short-tailed woodstar. Now I am working to trap a female of each species and use her to film the courtship dances of the males.

A purple-collared woodstar female.

The short-tailed woodstar, which is a species somewhat endemic to the Tumbes region, is a tiny hummingbird with a ridiculously small tail (that is actually what it says in the bird guide book). The males have an iridescent purple gorget (throat patch) and sing a song similar to the Costa’s hummingbirds in the US. They live in the tropical dry forests here, which are a very interesting habitat. It is very hot and sunny here, but the habitat is different than many I have visited in Peru. Here are some pictures of the dry forests:

Another short-tailed woodstar male.

The dry forests of Northern Peru(can you find the hummingbird?).

Another photo of the dry forests of Northern Peru (can you find the hummingbird?).

A dry riverbed within the dry forests.

A scarlet-backed woodpecker (Viniliornis callonotus)

A Peruvian meadowlark (Leistes bellicosa).

A burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia) that I scared up into the tree accidentally.

 

The purple-collared woodstar, is much more widespread in Peru, but tends to live at higher elevations. For them, we drive up into the Andes until about 6,500 ft (2,000 meters), and work in the montane scrub and agriculture areas there. I like these sites because they are much cooler than the dry forest below, and the mountains are very beautiful. This species has been a bit weird for me, because we have found many, many females, but only a few males. But the males we found will work just fine, and I have already seen them display naturally to females, which is a great sign! The purple-collared woodstar is especially interesting to me because of the color of its gorget. Most of the species in the group of hummingbirds I study (the bee hummingbirds) have purple, pink, or red gorgets, but the purple-collared woodstar has a greenish-blue iridescent gorget. I do not have any great pictures of the males yet, but here is the habitat in which we have found them, and a photo of the male from the side:

A male purple-collared woodstar, and you can see his blue gorget at the edge.

Some of the montane scrub where we find the purple-collared woodstar.

A riverbed, with some water, up in the mountains.

Another view of the montane scrub.

A male hepatic tanager (Piranga flava).

That is all I have for now, but I should have videos of courtship displays and photos of males that I have captured soon!

Why hummingbirds are so cool!

For this post, I am going to take a break from posting about my Peru travels to talk about hummingbirds and why they are so cool. My Ph.D. is focused on understanding hummingbird coloration and their courtship displays, but I am always asked why I chose to study hummingbirds over other animals. It certainly was not because they are an easy group to study. Quite the opposite – they can be very difficult to work with in some ways. Throughout this post, I am going to elaborate more on why I chose to study hummingbirds, but also in general, why hummingbirds are so interesting and fun to study. I am also going to include lots of pictures of different hummingbird species, as these are such photogenic animals!

Costa’s Hummingbird male, by me

Amazilia Hummingbird, by me

Female broad-tailed hummingbird on a nest, by me

Hummingbirds are only found in the New World (North, Central, and South America). There have been hummingbird-like fossils found in the Old World, and it is suggested that the ancestors of hummingbirds moved from the Old World to the New World through the Bering Straight. The ancestors then theoretically made their way down to South America and hummingbirds evolved from there. Hummingbirds are thought to have evolved about 22 million years ago, based on fossil and genetic data. Some of the oldest hummingbird species are pictures below.

There are roughly 340 species of hummingbirds currently, though new species are still being discovered. While we boast around 20-25 species in the United States, hummingbirds are most diverse in the Andes Mountains and Amazon Rainforest. The country with the most hummingbird species is Colombia, which boasts over 160 species!

Hummingbirds span a wide range of body sizes, with the smallest hummingbird (bee hummingbird) averaging around 2 grams (0.07 oz) and the largest hummingbird (giant hummingbird) averaging around 20 grams (0.7 oz). Many hummingbirds range between 3-7 grams overall (0.11-0.25 oz), and most of the species I study range between 2.5-4 grams (0.09-0.14 oz).

Museum specimens of a Giant Hummingbird next to a Bee Hummingbird with my hand as a size reference

Hummingbird flight is also very unique relative to birds. They flap their wings in a figure eight pattern, and unlike many birds, they generate similar forces with their upstrokes compared to their downstrokes. Hummingbirds can also hover, a rare trait in birds, and I believe they are the only birds that can fly backwards. Their metabolism is also very fast. Their weight can change quite a bit over the course of a day as they eat and burn up energy. And hummingbirds hearts can beat over 1000 times per minute. This fast metabolism poses a problem at night, when hummingbirds have to go many hours without eating. Some hummingbirds will go into a hibernation-like state at night, called torpor, to conserve energy. They essentially shut off their bodies, and their heart rate can drop from 1000 beats/min to 100 beats/min. This is especially common in hummingbirds that live in colder places or at high elevations. Some hummingbird species like the Ecuadorian Hillstar can occur up to 17,000 feet (~5200 meters) above sea level!

Broad-tailed hummingbird male by me

One misconception about hummingbirds is that they only feed on nectar. While they have definitely evolved many specializations for nectar feeding, such as their hovering, long bills, and fast metabolism, they cannot survive on sugar water alone. Hummingbirds feed on insects, such as fruit flies, in order to obtain essential proteins, vitamins, and minerals. However, hummingbird bills can present interesting challenges to eating insects, such as for the sword-billed hummingbird (longest bill to body length of a bird) or the sickle-billed hummingbird (below). Also, hummingbirds interestingly have forked tongues.

Because many hummingbirds live in the tropics, most do not migrate. There are some high elevation hummingbirds that will migrate to lower elevations during the winter/dry season in the tropics. In North America, we have several species that migrate. Some rufous hummingbirds travel from Mexico all the way to Alaska and back every year. Some ruby-throated hummingbirds fly straight across the Gulf of Mexico, an incredible feat for a bird that cannot store too much fat for the long trip. Interestingly, some hummingbird migratory paths have been changing due to hummingbird feeders. Many rufous hummingbirds are now found migrating to the Southeastern US instead of Mexico. Other species have expanded their ranges due to humans. Anna’s hummingbirds have expanded their range into Canada and Arizona, when they originally occurred in California.

There are several reasons I decided to study hummingbirds. The first reason is their crazy colors. You can essentially find every color under the rainbow in hummingbirds, and some species actually do seemingly have every color themselves (like the fiery-throated hummingbird). Hummingbirds also possess a fascinating type of color called iridescence. This type of color looks different depending on the angles it is observed from and the angles it is illuminated from. Essentially, as the hummingbird moves around, the color of its plumage will change, as shown in this video (link). Because I am interested in how behaviors and colors interact and co-evolved, iridescent coloration provides a great system to study these interactions. Overall, the species I study, while very pretty, are actually quite boring relative to many other hummingbird species. Here are a few of my favorite species:

Another reason I study hummingbirds, is that many of them have elaborate dances males perform to females. This is especially true in the 10- species I study. And the interesting part is that the species I study all have similar variations of two types of displays: 1) the dive display ; 2) the shuttle display (link). The dive display is typically where a male flies high into the air, and then dives down over or near his target. The shuttle display is where a male flies rapidly back and forth in front of their target (usually a female), facing it and presenting their throat coloration. Because these displays are similar across species, I can really explore how evolution shaped each species’ specific display and why they are different from each other.

Hummingbirds are also very charismatic and fun animals to work with and observe. They are so bold and curious. They live such fast-paced lives and are always interacting – mostly fighting. And because they occur all over the place, I have gotten to travel all across Arizona, California, and now Peru. Hummingbird’s reliance on nectar can also make it easy to lure them to feeders, where I can observe and catch them. It is still quite difficult to catch a hummingbird sometimes, but feeders definitely help. Overall, hummingbirds are such unique and interesting animals, providing lots of opportunities to study many aspects of their biology. But hummingbirds also provide opportunities to ask broad questions about color and behavior evolution, which is the key reason I am studying them. I actually just submitted my first chapter to a journal, so when that ultimately gets accepted (fingers crossed!) I will blog about those results. For now, I hope this post taught you a few cool facts about hummingbirds and provided a better explanation for why I study them. If you are interested in learning more about hummingbirds, there are two hummingbird-focused PBS Nature documentaries I would recommend. The first is Magic in the Air and the second is one I helped with called Super Hummingbirds (available for free here).

Back to blogging and a brief catch up!

Wow, it is amazing how time flies in grad school. It is hard to believe that is has been over four months since the last time I blogged! The main reason for my lack of blogging these past several months has been my work load. I ended up biting off a little more than I could chew, work-wise, this semester, which kept me from dedicating time to blogging. Luckily, I can say with confidence that I now have much more time to dedicate to this blog and it will not just disappear! Plus, I have a lot of exciting prospects in the future to talk about, so there will be no shortage of material to write about!

While most of the work things that kept me from blogging were not to exciting, I still had some very exciting events occur during that time. Firstly, I was awarded the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for $20,085!!!!! This was an amazing and huge success that will go a long way towards some exciting new research ventures. I was also awarded a United States Agency for International Research and Innovation Fellowship and an Arizona State University Graduate College Completion Fellowship!! Combined these grants and fellowships are allowing me to expand my research to studying hummingbirds in Peru and conduct electron microscopy on hummingbird feathers (both scanning “SEM” and transmission “TEM” electron microscopy). The electron microscopy work will allow me to quantify the surface and internal structures of hummingbird feathers that are responsible for producing the amazing colors hummingbirds exhibit, while the trip to Peru will allow me to study several new species for my dissertation work, such as the Peruvian sheartail and oasis hummingbird. Below are a few photos of some scanning electron microscopy work I have done so far.

A scanning electron microscopy image of a black-chinned hummingbird purple throat feather.

Another scanning electron microscopy image looking down some barbs of a broad-tailed hummingbird pink throat feather.

In addition to getting these grants and fellowships, I also gave my first set of public seminars on my hummingbird dissertation research. I first gave an hour long seminar to the Maricopa Audubon Society (link) and then gave another hour long seminar through the Audubon’s Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch’s Potluck and Presentations series (link). Both of these talks were great experiences, and they seemed to be met with enthusiasm from the audience, which was very encouraging.

Outside of grants and talks I did some fieldwork in March on Costa’s and Allen’s hummingbirds, visited the Grand Canyon and Sedona, went on some adventures in Michigan, and visited my undergraduate university (Trinity University). I will try to make a post out of each of these, but here are a few photos from each.

A Costa’s hummingbird perched at Boyd Deep Canyon in California.

An Allen’s hummingbird I filmed and caught in Riverside, California.

A view from the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park.

The beautiful red rocks near Sedona, AZ.

A sizable waterfall at Tahquamenon Falls State Park in Michigan.

Looking out at Lake Michigan over the the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.

One of the newly remodeled and awesome science buildings at Trinity University.

 

I greatly appreciate everyone’s patients with my lack of posting, but I am very happy to be back and excited to start blogging again! I would also like to give a shout out to my old school friends from Houston – Gabe and Carl. Thank you for keeping up with my blog!!

Until next time!
Rick

The Evolution of a Graduate Student: from Start to Hummingbirds

It is amazing how time can fly in grad school. It did not seem that long since I last blogged, but here we are a month later. I mostly blame writing an NSF DDIG (a really big graduate student grant), but I also do not always have the best memory….. Anyways, I actually have not gone on many adventures in the past few weeks, but through writing my NSF DDIG, I have  reflected a lot on my path from starting graduate school to where I am now, and so this post is going to be on how I initially became interested in hummingbirds (a weird accident) and how I ended up with my current dissertation work.

The brilliantly colored Costa’s hummingbird.

For starters, when I arrived at ASU, hummingbirds and iridescent coloration were no where on my radar for potential dissertation topics. I have always been interested in the diversity in animal coloration and questions about why animals use multiple traits to communicate (e.g. song and colorful plumage are both used for communication in many bird species), so my project now definitely still falls in that broad interest. But, I was going to Dr. Kevin McGraw’s lab, a world expert on bird pigment coloration, specifically carotenoid coloration (responsible for many of the reds, yellows, and oranges, such as in house finches or yellow warblers), so I was looking into species that either hard multiple different carotenoid colors, such as the western tanager:

A western tanager with its red head and yellow body near Lake Tahoe in California.

Or species like the northern cardinal, which use different types of pigments to color themselves (the red is carotenoids while the black face mask is due to melanins).

A northern cardinal at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, AZ

I had originally given thought to non-pigmented colors to some degree, such as the blue coloration in the painted bunting or varied bunting, which is due to specific arrangements of the nanostructure of their feathers. Overall, it seemed that I was focused on why certain birds/animals have multiple colors. But then everything changed when ASU teamed up with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and offered semester-long fellowships to potentially start up dissertations in the tropics. This was an amazing opportunity, which I immediately jumped on.

Me in Panama – photo credit: Alex Tran

At first, I wanted to keep the multiple color patches idea and study some of the extremely colorful tropical birds, but I was told that many of the birds I was thinking of studying, such as the golden-hooded tanager (below), were not very common and/or lived in the canopy, which would make things very difficult. So I ended up shifting my question from multiple color patches to multiple signals and studied song and color in an understory bird – the red-throated ant-tanager.

A golden-hooded tanager in central Panama.

Red-throated ant-tanager in central Panama

My work in Panama went fairly well for a first field season, but difficulties during that fieldwork were not why I switched to hummingbirds. My switch to hummingbirds came from a combination of watching the many species of hummingbirds feeding and fighting at our hummingbird feeders in Panama and reading a specific paper – Iridescence: a functional perspective – which has come to be one of the most influential papers I have read to date.

White-necked jacobins and a violet-crowned woodnymph at a feeder in central Panama (don’t mind their creepy eyes, it is from the flash).

And so, I began many thought experiments and discussions with fellow researches to come up with a project involving iridescent coloration using hummingbirds as my model. For a while I was thinking about looking at how hummingbirds might use their coloration to communicate with other species as they fought at feeders, but my idea switched to wanting to study the use of coloration within species and how that might have evolved. And so I returned to the United States with this idea in mind and began working it into a dissertation project with Kevin. Like a good advisor, he challenged me to continue to craft my idea and find gaps in the field to make a novel and exciting dissertation. And around the same time, he introduced me to Dr. Christopher Clark, a new professor at UC Riverside, who studies hummingbird courtship and acoustics. Eventually we visited him at one of his field sites and saw the hummingbirds in action.

Boyd Deep Canyon – a UC Davis field station near Palm Desert, CA. This is where Chris took Kevin and I to see hummingbirds in action, and where I ended up studying Costa’s hummingbirds with great success.

It was then, when I learned what I could and could not do with these birds and was able to finally craft my dissertation project. I was going to (and am now) studying how hummingbird plumage coloration and courtship displays co-evolved and interact to produce the colors females see as males display!

A broad-tailed hummingbird at Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, AZ

Another huge influence on my idea developments came from my interactions and amazing discussions with my two former lab mates Dr. Russell (Rusty) Ligon and Dr. Brett Seymoure, who were both studying color communication and sensory ecology. It was a great time for developing my ideas as Rusty was in his 4th year when I started and Brett in his 3rd, so I had a good deal of overlap with them.

Sadly this is the only picture I could find of the three of us (Rusty, myself, Brett). Sorry for the tiny photo and poor quality! Photo from mcgraw.lab.asu.edu

Now, both Rusty and Brett have graduated, and the lab has changed quite a bit. Most of Kevin’s students are very mechanistically focused (meaning they are interested in studying the physiological or biochemical underpinnings behind behavior and coloration), such as my lab mate Pierce Hutton, who is studying anthropogenic effects on house finch coloration and behavior. This has been great, because it is forcing me to think more like that (I typically think about the functions and evolutionary history of behavior and coloration). I am currently working to integrate mechanistic studies into my current hummingbird work, and this is something I am building with my DDIG proposal (more on that if I get it!).

Pierce and I up near Payson, AZ, photo credit: Meghan Duell.

So that is now I transitioned from starting grad school to studying the evolution of hummingbird coloration and courtship displays. I hope you enjoyed my story!

 

Conferencing in England, and Meeting a Ton of People!

After a long summer of fieldwork, I traveled across the pond to present my research at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE) biannual meeting. The meeting was held in Exeter, England, and then I traveled to a post-conference symposium on anti-predator coloration in Penryn, England. Both of these events were held on University of Exeter campuses, which were quite pretty campuses. This post will be part travel-blog but also a shout out to the many people I met at the conference with links to their personal websites (or twitters if they do not have their own website), because they were all awesome and you should check them out!

A view from one of the high points on the University of Exeter campus, overlooking the university and town.

This ISBE conference, plus the symposium, was the most productive conference I have been to in my grad career. I teamed up with my former lab mate, Brett Seymoure, to do some major networking, which was super helpful for our academic careers, but also a ton of fun! Brett and I are both very interested in animal communication and sensory ecology, specifically visual ecology. Europe and especially England has a very rich community of visual ecologists that work on a variety of systems and questions. Because of the post-conference symposium, most of those people were at the meeting, and we were able to meet many of them. One of the key labs we interacted with, and the lab which put on the symposium, was Martin Steven’s lab. Martin is a well known visual ecologist who has developed, with his current post doc Jolyon Troscianko, several useful techniques for measuring coloration and pattern using photographs. I am using one of their recommended setups for my dissertation, and while I was at the conference, I was able to sit down with Jolyon and get some great feedback and ask many questions, which was super helpful! Martin has also created a great network of students either currently in his lab, or that did a masters in his lab and are now elsewhere, and Brett and I were able to meet many of them. His group studies a large variety of animals from color changing crabs (Sara Mynott), to very colorful moths (Emmanuelle Briolat) and ladybirds (Sarah Paul), to incredibly cryptic nightjars. Martin has also had many people visit his lab, including my former lab mate Russell Ligon, who sadly was not at the conference, and Elisa Badas , who studies bird and egg coloration.

Brett and I out in the town of Exeter.

During the conference, I was also able to reconnect with several people I had either worked with or previously met. My undergrad advisor, Troy Murphy, who was a major influence on where I am today, was at the meeting, and it was great to catch up with him. I worked with Troy both on his goldfinch bill coloration research and my undergrad thesis on wood warbler coloration, and he introduced me to my first bout of fieldwork on animal coloration in Canada (and he also introduced me to my current Ph.D. advisor). I was able to meet up with a friend I made at a different conference in Japan, Jared Wilson-Aggarwal, who I toured Tokyo with for a few days. He previously worked with Martin on the nightjar project, but now studies dog social behavior and how that relates to disease transmission in Africa. I also reconnected with Trevor Price , from the University of Chicago, who recently gave a talk at ASU and also gave a plenary lecture at ISBE. Trevor has done some very interesting work on birds in the Himalayas, and has now developed a keen interest in color vision and has many cool ideas. Trevor also helped me meet Gavan Thomas and his post-doc Chris Cooney, who are undertaking an awesome project to photograph every bird species via museum skins and study avian color evolution across all birds with great detail.

Brett and I with Trevor Price. ISBE created a bingo card with different things to do while at the conference, and one was take a selfie with a plenty speaker – check!

Speaking of plenary lectures, there were many great ones at ISBE, given by huge names in our field. We had speakers such as Tim Clutton-Brock and Malte Andersson (who wrote the famous book Sexual Selection), but my favorite talk came from Rosemary Grant. Rosemary and her husband Peter, famously followed up on Darwin’s work in the Galapagos on Darwin’s finches, and published much groundbreaking and influential work. It was a real treat to see her present, especially since I have received a grant with her namesake from the Society of the Study of Evolution.

While at ISBE, we went on a mid-conference tour, which took us to the beautiful Dartmoor National Park, where we was able to see the amazing Wistman’s Wood, which is a stunted oak forest covered in moss and lichen. Also in the park were many tors (hills topped with outcrops of bedrock), which dotted the landscape. While  on the tour, we met two students from Emily DuVal’s lab, Jess and Karla, who study brown-headed nuthatches and lance-tailed manakins respectively. Me and all my lab mates (Pierce, Melinda, and Brett) also had lunch with Jenny Ouyang, who studies the effect of light pollution on bird physiology and hormones.

Dartmoor National Park, with Wistman’s Wood in the distance.

Under the canopy of Wistman’s Wood.

A view of the diversity of mosses and lichen found in Wistman’s Wood.

Another view from inside Wistman’s Wood.

Our tour guide showing us an inscription where a previous king had cut down a tree here.

A wider view of the forest.

A close up of the mosses, lichens, and ferns growing all over the branches and trunks.

One of the many tors in the area.

Another tor, with the grassland/peatbog landscape all around.

A jackjaw we found at the pub in the national park.

My poster presentation went very well, and despite being placed in the back corner of the room, I had continuous traffic and nearly lost my voice by the end from talking so much. I presented some preliminary results from my first chapter, which was great to finally get out. This poster allowed me to establish my name in the field and get on many people’s radars, which is great for future post-doc positions! At the anti-predator coloration symposium, I presented a project that I am helping Brett with on Gila monster coloration. Gila monster coloration seems to change with age, and so we explored if this was true, and found evidence that young Gila monsters might be more conspicuous than adults, which leads to some very interesting ideas about a potential switch in anti-predator strategies from aposematism to crypsis. The talk went over very well, mostly because people really loved the fact that monsters are real!

Me and my poster!

While at the anti-predator coloration symposium, I was able to continue to hang out with many of the visual ecology students I met at ISBE, including Sara, Sarah, and Emmanuelle (from above) plus Sam Smithers (studies polarized vision), Jenny Easley (studies avian taste perception), and Diana Umeton (studies flicker fusion vision). I also met many more visual ecologists at the symposium, where everyone present gave a 5 minute talk with built in time in-between talks for plenty of discussion. The symposium, while exhausting, was incredible, because we were all unified with an interest in coloration and visual ecology, and I was able to meet big names in the field such as Tom Cronin (studies many aspects of vision) and Innes Cuthill (studies many aspects of anti-predator coloration). I also reconnected with Hannah Rowland, who I met in Japan as well, and heard more about her interesting work on avian taste perception & learning and anti-predator defense. I learned a great deal more about mammalian anti-predator defense from Ted Stankowich, which was very fascinating and has been under studied. And finally, I met and hung out with several other graduate students/post-docs, including Amanda Franklin (studies mantis shrimp communication), Emily Burdfield-Steel (studies variation in tiger moth chemical defense), Sandra Winters (studies primate coloration and diversity), and Jenna Proctor and Alice Rosen who both just started in Martin Steven’s lab to study crab and amphibian coloration, respectively.

The main restaurant/bar street in Falmouth, which is the town next to Penryn and where all of the social activities occurred during the post-conference symposium.

After meeting so many great people and hearing about so much interesting work, I returned to the states exhausted, but also inspired to get back to work and try to live up to the high caliber of research already existing in the fields of animal coloration and visual ecology. I want to thank everyone I met for taking time to share their research with me and provide feedback on my own work.

For those who study any aspect of behavior or color that have never been to ISBE, I HIGHLY recommend going to the next meeting in 2018! Also when it comes to meetings, networking is so important. It helps you get your research out there, both to get feedback and also to get people interested in you or form new collaborations. For me it is definitely easier to network and meet new people if I’m with someone, like I was with Brett this conference. But I’ve also gotten a lot of help from my Ph.D. advisor, Kevin McGraw, who has introduced me to many important people and instrumental collaborators. So my advice is to both find a networking buddy and talk to your advisor about meeting specific people (i.e. do some homework before the meeting), and that will hopefully help open you up to new research opportunities or future job possibilities!