31Jan10
Ok, back from a behavior conference in Steamboat Springs (that’s me on the right, snowboarding!).

Lots of new ideas swimming around in my head after this conference. The Winter Animal Behavior Conference is a diverse collection of behavior researchers.  They study the behavior of everything from computer animicules to bugs to slugs to lobsters to fish to birds to rodents to primates.  

Note that most animal behaviorists lay off humans.  The study of humans is a bit too dicey for most of us.  The ratio of heat to light is too high.  Any hypothesis, no matter how reasonable, generates huge controversy in the study of human behavior.  The noisy heat of the controversy tends to occlude any light that is shed by the data.

So we study animal behavior.  For some, the goal is to better understand human behavior.  For the rest of us the goal is to understand general principles, and especially the evolution of behavior.  

For me, the key reason for going to this conference, besides snowboarding my tail off, is to hear new ideas, to see what new experimental approaches are emerging, and sometimes to initiate collaborations.

This year was a gold mine.  Amazing talks by a host of “newbies”.  I’ll be referring to them in the next few postings.  I told them about the ravenous lobsters of Big Fisherman Cove, and they liked the story.  These guys are more interested in the learning than in the ecology (just the opposite of my buddies at the conference in November), but there is plenty of juice for everyone in this story.

Anyway, my next junket is coming up at the end of February.  Off to Costa Rica to study the natural history of a slug species that doesn’t learn!

Stay tuned.