Back in July, I got to present at the Animal Behavior Society (ABS) virtual conference. ABS is always a bit intense, not because the people are mean or intimidating, I feel like ABS is one of the most welcoming conferences I’ve participated in. It’s just so much. Most of the talks are 15-30 minutes, and they have about 4 parallel sessions going at once, So you spend all day, for several days, running around the venue trying to get to the talks that you want to catch, and inevitably you are faced with some impossible dilemmas and you just have to choose. A friend of mine described it as a “science bender”, which I think is pretty accurate.

This year, do to a global pandemic, all of the presentations were pre-recorded, and the videos were posted online, and it was honestly a dream. As a presenter, it was fun to be able to say exactly what I wanted to and integrate animations smoothly. As a attendee, it was like having science netflix, and the office hours were also surprisingly nice. Instead of having to chase down whichever scientist you want to talk to and awkwardly insert yourself into their conversation, you could just find them in their office hours and chat.

Anyway, reviewing ABS probably makes for boring blog post, but I’m extremely grateful to the organizers who managed to turn what could have been a big disappointment into a refreshing change of pace.

Anyway, for my video, I thought about what element of my main thesis project would be really excited to animal behavior folks, and I settled on what was a pretty interesting question to me:

Why do birds mate when they do?

So songbirds (in my case cowbirds) generally link their copulation to song production, in that a male will sing, the female produces a copulation solicitation display, in which she arches her back to invite and facilitate copulation, and then copulation occurs (quickly).

But males sing to females hundreds or thousands of times a day. What’s different about the song that drove the CSD?

I’m preparing a whole paper which will hopefully be up on bioRxiv in the near future, but in the mean time, check out this teaser trailer, the youTube version of my ABS talk.

Honestly, this video was a blast to make, if I can block out the time, I hope to make fun YouTube explainer videos for all my papers. Stay tuned for the paper version!