What happens at the symposium...
Hi,
Just came back from the symposium and thought I may some news from the world:
Sometimes catching birds is not only about catching birds. I mean, it rarely is and we usually do it to figure out how things work. We do it to learn where birds migrate and how long it takes them, we do it to learn their life-history traits and we do it so that we can protect them along with all the ecological services they provide to people, e.g. by eliminating agricultural pests. But we also do it to monitor vector-borne diseases, which may not be the most obvious thing that comes to your mind.
Although there are a couple of theories why animals engage in same-sex behaviour, one of them is sexual pleiotropy. Simplifying a great deal, genes responsible for the same-sex behaviour could be linked with other genes increasing the fitness of the host (think gene hitchhiking) and tag along with them during sexual recombination. But the best person to explain that would be Katarina.
If it goes about my very own research updates, I hasten to say that our field season has been good so far and we ringed lots of chunky, grumpy hatchlings:
Ciao,
Agnes
