Charlotte Christensen
Research
Vulturine guineafowl are hard to miss on the Kenyan savanna, be it due to their striking blue feathers, their piercing calls (click here for a sample at your own risk) or their sheer numbers (with aggregations reaching well over 200 birds). During my time as a field technician, I helped build the GPS and observational database used to uncover details about their multi-level societies and how group-dynamics changes in response to environmental factors (check out this work led by Dr Danai Papageorgiou). Back as a postdoc in Prof Damien Farine's lab, I'm using on-bird accelerometer and environmental data to look at how the guineafowl respond to harsh physical environments, such as prolonged droughts. Watch this space!
PC: Charlotte Christensen
Social dynamics, Space-use and Foraging Ecology
in Vulturine Guineafowl
Grooming, Physiology and Urban space-use
in Chacma Baboons
Chacma baboons are one of the most widely studied primate species. They spend large proportions of their day grooming (up to 20%!) - but why? Grooming plays an important role in maintaining social bonds and it may help to reduce physiological stress-levels too. During my PhD in Dr Ines Fürtbauer's and Dr Andrew King's lab, we used tri-axial accelerometers to identify grooming and non-invasive hormone sampling (read: collecting many faecal and urine samples) to directly investigate whether grooming indeed reduces physiological stress... with some surprising results. In the same troop, work led by Dr. Anna Bracken, showed that urban space alters baboon behaviour substantially, from how they coordinate group movement to how baboon mothers assess risk.
PC: Charlotte Solman
Dwarf mongooses engage in collective territorial defence, which involves scent-marking latrine sites dotted around their home-range. During my MSc in Prof Andrew Radford's lab, we showed experimentally that encountering scent-marks from outside groups causes dwarf mongooses to spend longer at latrines and move slower in the aftermath (check it out). This work was carried on by Dr Amy Morris-Drake, who found that after encountering out-group scent-marks and vocalisations, dwarf mongooses were more vigilant and foraged closer together (that's right). This suggests that inter-group conflict can have lasting costs, even if no physical altercations took place.
PC: Julie Kern
