Lawrence M. Dill , PhD, FRSC
Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University
Here is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Committee about Dr. Dill's research: Larry has published several papers that have dramatically changed our discipline. Lima and Dill. 1990. Behavioral decisions made under the risk of predation - a review and prospectus. Canadian Journal of Zoology 68: 619-640. This is a must read for anyone who studies predator-prey interactions. The paper carefully dissects the predation sequence from encounter through detection, attack and capture and provides a framework for how animals use behaviour to avoid being consumed at each point in the sequence. The paper summarized everything we knew about things such as how prey altered when they are active, where they lived and what they ate when exposed to risk, but also forced us to start working on filling basic gaps like how risk influences reproduction in animals. With more than 4600 citations this is one of the most cited papers ever published in our discipline.
Esteban Fernandez-Juricic, PhD
Department of Biological Sciences Showalter Faculty Scholar,
Purdue University
Here is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Committee about Dr. Fernandez-Juricic's research: I think Esteban’s work is remarkably interdisciplinary and integrative. He studies pretty much all levels of Tinbergian analysis and because all of his mechanistic work is ultimately framed in an adaptive/functional context (he is one of the few people who pulls this off seamlessly), he is a leader in the field of the study of the evolution of mechanisms underlying both foraging and antipredator behavior. Moreover, because he thinks about the application of this mechanistic knowledge for wildlife conservation and management, I view him as one of only a handful of people effectively integrating cutting-edge insights from visual sensory ecology to wildlife management. Indeed, his fundamental understanding of how birds see and detect both color and movement could genuinely help reduce airstrikes that are responsible for both massive property loss as well as the loss of life. It is not engaging in hyperbole to say that Esteban’s research in avian visual ecology could be life-saving.
Ann V. Hedrick, PhD
Adjunct Professor, University of California, Davis
Here is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Committee about Dr. Hedrick's research: It’s hard to remember that at one point conventional wisdom was that behavior doesn’t have a heritable component; Ann’s 1988 paper was one of the first and most important to put a nail in that coffin. As Beth Jacob put it, “Ann Hedrick started to have an impact on the discipline of animal behavior as a graduate student. She accomplished what Stephen Stearns advised in "Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students": "Go right to the foundations and test the implicit but unexamined assumptions of an important body of work." At that time, in the 1980s, there was discussion in the literature about whether traits under intensive sexual selection would have low variation or whether variation could be maintained in some way. She clearly and logically laid out the problem: " the hypothesis that preferred male traits are heritable has remained virtually untested for natural populations... An unambiguous test of this hypothesis should include both (1) a precise identification within a population of a male trait used by females to discriminate among potential mates; and (2) a measurement of the heritability of this trait, made in the same population." Ann then went on to nicely demonstrate that cricket song varies in the population, that some males' song is more attractive than others, and that the song is heritable, using quantitative genetics techniques. This paper was published in The American Naturalist. Those early papers were a harbinger of a career's worth of equally elegant and well-crafted publications, primarily on sexual selection but also expanding to other areas, such as personality.Ann was one of the first to show that male acoustic mate attraction displays are heavily influenced by predators and likely as a result, males compensate for this by being extra vigilant. This finding set the stage for Ann’s more recent work on animal personalities in insects, where she has been one of the true leaders in the field of personality research.
David B. McDonald, PhD
Professor, Zoology, Department of Zoology and Physiology, University of Wyoming
Here is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Committee about Dr. McDonald's’s research: Dr. McDonald is an “early-adopter” whose work produces insights that are years to decades ahead of the curve. For example, his analysis of relatedness among interacting birds in a wild population (McDonald & Potts 1994) was important both because it soundly rejected kin selection as an explanation for cooperative display behavior in Chiroxiphia manakins, and because it was an early example of an analytical approach that is now considered a meat-and-potatoes requirement for studies investigating social interactions. Likewise, Dr. McDonald was one of the first to use of network analysis in the in-depth analysis of social behavior in wild animals. He took analytical tools that had been developed and long-established in the social sciences and applied them to analyze the lifetime effects of early-life network relationships among manakins. He found that early connectivity correlated with later increases in social status (McDonald 2007). More recently, he played a key role in a comprehensive review of the use of social networks in the analysis of animal relationships (Pinter-Wollman et al. 2014), providing a timely and useful assessment of the current state of social network research in animal behavior. His most recent publication further demonstrates his ability to combine disciplines, as he applied approaches from population genetics to the analysis of social networks (McDonald & Hobson 2018).
Gail L. Patricelli, PhD
Professor, Dept. of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis
Here is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Committee about Dr. Patricelli’s research: Her classic work used female bower bird robots (that can signal to a courting male the female’s level of interest) to quantify individual differences among males in their courtship responsiveness (Patricelli et al. 2002 Nature, 2006 Animal Behaviour). Remarkably, she showed that variation in the ability of males to adaptively modulate their courtship intensity in response to moment-to-moment variation in the robot female’s behavior played a major role in explaining variation in overall mating success. This study continues to be THE standout study on the critical role that behavioral responsiveness (what has been termed ‘social skill’ or ‘social competence’) plays in sexual selection. In a system where the characteristics of the physical bower or of the male’s complex song are clearly important, Gail’s seminal experiments with robots showed that individual differences in male responsiveness in the dynamic male-female courtship interplay also play a large role in sexual selection. This work is one of the most celebrated, relatively recent studies in animal behavior both in our professional circles, and in public media. It was featured in National Geographic, Science News, PBS, ABC, Discover magazine, and numerous newspaper articles etc.
David W. Stephens, PhD
Professor & Head, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of
Minnesota
Here is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Committee about Dr. Stephen’s research: Dave’s body of work is inspiring for the elegance both of theory development and of experimental design in testing theory. I am continually struck by how uniquely insightful Dave and colleagues are on topics that I thought I knew quite a lot about, such as learning or multimodal signaling. Problems are stripped down to their essential elements and interesting results produced. Dave’s model on learning and environmental change published in 1991 is a good example. The model (paper cited in the appended list of representative publications) yielded the inference that learning would evolve only if the environment was unpredictable but not too unpredictable. The model set conditions on what is ‘too unpredictable.’ As Dave put it, today must tell you something about tomorrow for learning to be of benefit. A recent example of clarity in theory and test is reflected in the recent work by Dunlap and Stephens (PRSB, 2009) on the role of fixity of action and reliability of reward in the evolution of learned and unlearned preference. These two factors had not previously been put forward together as crucial elements to consider in the study of learned preference, despite a huge literature in ethology, psychology and behavioral ecology on learned preference. The study, which included both model and tests using Drosophila, became the cornerstone of an ongoing funded project that has resulted in multiple publications, including one in PNAS in 2014 (citation in appended list). My remarks here are made as a student of animal learning. However, students of optimality theory, game theory and animal communication would undoubtedly make similar remarks about papers in those areas.