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A big moment

At 4pm yesterday, my unread emails hit 1,000. Sorry world. But also, can you leave me alone?!

(At least the Sylvie pic is soothing)

It prompted some fairly hysterical exchanges with friends who are academics. 973 was one counter; 2713 another; and the winner/loser? One friend who has 39,762 unread emails! (Two incredible other friends have zero, but let’s not think about that)

Working on a book…

I’m hiding in Dwight to get some reading and writing done for the book, sometimes while simultaneously paddling…

Here, an excellent (if challenging) new paper from Heather Browning keeps me occupied during a tea break on the Oxtongue River:

A big day for Jess… and Phil the Cat

The week before last, Jess has her PhD defence, and like Aileen’s it was really fun and useful (especially for me; Jess’s adrenaline levels might have been a bit too high for full enjoyment). It was all on Zoom, so here we are with external examiner Jeremy Bailoo, non-committee member Jim Petrik, committee member Charlotte Winder, and chair Hafiz Maharali (also co-author on the new carnivore paper!).

I can report she just had one single typo to correct, and that was it! So on Wednesday we celebrated Dr. Cait with (you guessed it), tea at The Boathouse. And then on Monday she officially re-joined my lab as a MITACS fellow, sponsored by the CCAC!

It’s not just been a big week for Jess. Aileen moved to Ottawa for her own MITACS fellowship, and after a long drive the day before, discovered a small furry stow-away when she went to unpack the van: Phil, the lovely cat of her Guelph house-mates, had snuck into a box of her clothes and accidentally travelled 500 km east! He was very happy to be found (and then got to watch Jess’s defence on Aileen’s lap).

Should I stay or should I go? Why wide-ranging Carnivora are prone to welfare problems in captivity

It’s been a long and painful journey (including our original “Should I stay or should I go?” title being mocked for unoriginality by the editors, and ahem they may have a point!). But the final paper from Miranda‘s thesis – aided by many new statistical analyses and checks by Emma (that’s ‘Big Emma’ of course, since we’re talking about PCMs), and substantial re-writes by me – just came out in Royal Society Open Science, and is a thing of real beauty (though of course I might be biased!).

In it, we dug-into by the by now fairly well-replicated predictive effects of annual home range size on Carnivore welfare, to try and identify why being wide-ranging confers risk. We first identified and collected data on eight correlates of home range size (reflecting energetic needs, movement, intra-specific interactions, and itinerant lifestyles). Using data on captive juvenile mortality (from 13,518 individuals across 42 species) and stereotypic route-tracing (456 individuals, 27 species), we then assessed whether any of these correlates both statistically explained the variance in welfare caused by range size, and also more strongly predicted welfare than did home range size itself.

We found that having itinerant lifestyles was the key: animals that only use a small fraction of their annual range at a time, repeatedly relocating multiple times over the course of a year, are the ones at risk. Like our parrot work, this may indicate that some species have cognitive needs (here perhaps for choice, control or variety) that are tough to meet in captive conditions.

We think this helps explain why carnivores as diverse as polar bears and giant pandas are challenging to keep and breed in captivity, while other naturally more stay-at-home animals (like red foxes and American mink) can even cope to some extent with intensive fur farm conditions. Our results also support the creative enclosure designs being developed by some modern zoos (like Philadelphia Zoo’s cool trail system: https://www.philadelphiazoo.org/zoo360/).

“At least it has a blue light”

In her scraps of time between submitting her PhD thesis to the Atrium and leaving for Ottawa, Aileen valiantly squeezed in getting some stored blood samples assayed for cytokines again, so we can build up the sample size (while Lindsey chips away at the stored hippocampi of the same animals).

This time I went myself to see the Very Expensive Multiplex Machine put the Very Expensive Kits to use. We both agreed that the small-ish, squat taupe box was a little anticlimactic, but as Aileen said “at least it has a blue light”, and watching graphs zigzag up and down live on the computer was both hypnotic and impressive. Now the next step is waiting for Millipore to analyse some of the lower resolution values (using magic), and then we can finally see how housing and behavioural phenotype predict cytokine profiles…

And yet more congratulations still!

Basma (here on LinkedIn) now has a beautiful baby called Nile, and ‘Little Emma‘ (here on LindkedIn) got engaged to longterm beau Haider:

New semester’s resolution

My sabbatical is over, and the pandemic is over (in my mind anyway), yet I’m still working near 100% at home. It has to stop!!! New semester’s resolution: work in my IB office at least 2 days a week … but, but, but will the view from my desk be as good???

Old and new lab get-together

I did a bit of grumbling about my (*entirely self-imposed*) three-country trip, but here was a lovely highlight in “Leg 2”: an old-and-new lab get together in Drummond Street (London’s home of South Indian cuisine). Lindsey, Lauren and Aileen were still a bit jet laggy by this point, but well on the way to being ready for Tallinn. Also, everyone got to eat their curry this time!

They’re not the world’s greatest photos, but…

… here left to right is Lindsey (N), Lauren (N), Sophie (O), Suzanne (O), Charlie (O), me (VO), Aileen (N), Agustina (O) and Maria, hiding (O) (where N = new, O = old, and VO = very old)…

… and here, the Guelphites show off to Prathipa that they now know what a paper dosa is (even if everyone’s heads got a bit distorted in the process).

Kinky failure

I wanted to post this, as it adds to our very substantive Back Catalogue of Failures. As Prathipa planned her mate choice tests, one worry I had was that the behaviour of the mice would just reflect social curiosity, rather than actual sexual interest. So I suggested designing a mesh window that would let them to adopt lordosis and mounting postures, if they wanted to, and here (left) is the result. But in reality, I needn’t have worried, thanks to Prathipa’s very sensible use of oestrous-induction and skilled recording of singing. Also, the mice did not remotely feel the urge to try and mate through the mesh. Indeed their ‘intimacy coordinator’ reports that they found the very idea quite sordid and uncomfortable. Sorry about that, mousies.