This meeting and presentation took place entirely online via Zoom.
At 7:00 p.m., President Debbie Mullins called the Society meeting to order.
President Mullins welcomed the attendees. She noted that this is the last general meeting and lecture program before summer break. The next season’s first meeting and lecture will be on September 10, 2024.
President Mullins observed that some great birds were being seen on the Society’s Tuesday morning migration walks in Central Park. The remaining two walks of the season are May 20 and May 28. The walks are open to the public but in order to manage headcount, registration is required via the Society website.
The Society’s conservation committee in conjunction with the Central Park Conservancy has arranged a service project to assist Conservancy staff with cleanup work in the Hernshead and Triplets Bridge areas of the park. It is scheduled for Saturday, June 1, at 10:00 a.m. To participate, register on the Conservancy website via the link provided in President Mullins’ email notice of the May, 2024, meeting.
Society members had been asked to vote online on two motions in advance of this meeting:
Motion 1: Request to approve the minutes of the April, 2024, general meeting. The minutes were approved by a vote of 127 in favor, two abstaining, and none opposed.
Motion 2: Request to approve the membership applications of twelve new members. The applications were approved by a vote of 127 in favor, one opposed, and one abstaining. President Mullins warmly welcomed the following new members:
- Jenny Landsman, Active Membership, Sponsored by Amanda Bielskas
- Daniel Landsman, Active Membership, Sponsored by Amanda Bielskas
- Gail Dinter-Gottlieb, Active Membership, Sponsored by Lisa Curtiss
- Norman Krausse, Active Membership, Sponsored by Carine Mitchell
- Elaine Lavin, Active Membership, Sponsored by Kristin Ellington
- Carol Mager, Active Membership, Sponsored by Jane Ellison
- Bonnie Eissner, Active Membership, Sponsored by Mindy Kaufman
- Jane Hoffer, Active Membership, Sponsored by Joyce Wright
- Lisa Borg, Active Membership, Sponsored by Amanda Bielskas
- Janay Wong, Active Membership, Sponsored by Chuck McAlexander
- Marcia Numan Klug, Active Membership, Sponsored by Miriam Rakowski
- Elijah Shiffer, From Associate to Active, Sponsored by Debbie Mullins
Speaking to the audience at large, President Mullins encouraged those who aren’t members of the Linnaean Society to join, saying that it is open to all. She described the process for joining, noting that details can be found on the Society’s website.
At 7:08 p.m., President Mullins turned to the lecture program and introduced the speaker, Dr. Gail L. Patricelli, professor at the University of California, Davis, in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, and chair of the Animal Behavior Graduate Group. Dr. Patricelli is an animal behaviorist, with research focusing on behavioral ecology, bioacoustics, and conservation of birds. Her research includes study of animal signals and other breeding behaviors and how they are influenced by their environments. Dr. Patricelli’s presentation to the Society focused in particular on her research into the courtship behaviors of the Greater Sage-Grouse and the ways these studies inform approaches to conservation.
Lecture: “Robots, Telemetry, & the Sex Lives of Wild Birds: Using Technology to Study Courtship and Conservation,” presented by Dr. Gail L. Patricelli
Dr. Patricelli began by discussing courtship behavior in terms of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, showing examples of various species’ adaptations to avoid predators. She then observed how the theory falls short for dramatically showy animals like peafowl, thus leading to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which helps to explain the evolution of traits that improve competitiveness for mates. Much of Dr. Patricelli’s scientific work has focused on seeking an understanding of the traits associated with sexual selection; this presentation described some of that work, as well as its role in conservation efforts to protect, in particular, the Greater Sage-Grouse.
Throughout the animal kingdom, the mechanisms of sexual selection include more than the visual. As Dr. Patricelli noted, “Courtship is often more like a negotiation than an advertisement.” There are multiple components to successful mating, and research to tease them out is difficult. It requires detailed measuring of subtle male and female behaviors, identifying social context, and implementing experimentally controlled interactions, among other things, to characterize the elements that contribute to optimal behavior for courtship success. Dr. Patricelli’s field work has used robotic models of female birds in the design of her experiments. She described her PhD studies of the courting behavior of Satin Bowerbirds, for which she designed a robotic female bowerbird and controlled its behavior. After measuring the responsiveness of the male, she concluded that the male’s ability to respond to female signals and cues were as important as his ability to sing, dance, and make an attractive nest.
Dr. Patricelli’s more recent studies on courtship interactions have moved beyond single breeding pairs. They involve the Greater Sage-Grouse, a lek-breeding species, thus adding additional dimensions and complexities. Dr. Patricelli described the dynamics of the lek – how for a few months in late winter to early spring, males and females gather on the lek, where males perform strutting displays that females evaluate in order to decide on a mate. Her descriptions were illustrated with photos of the lek at her research location in Lander, Wyoming, and video of the lek at 32-times speed with real-time audio, and real-time and slow-motion video of an up-close male doing his strutting display.
To study the mating behaviors of Greater Sage-Grouse on the lek, robotic females were designed in order to capture the data needed to identify the attributes that influence mate selection and successful mating. The robotic females were taxidermy birds with robotic internals, including a camera in the breast to record interactions. One of the first experiments was designed to test the hypothesis that successful males will wait until a female is close to him before expending the high energy needed to perform a display of high quality to win her over, rather than doing a large number of lower quality displays. The robot was remotely guided along a G-scale model train track. Dr. Patricelli played the video of the first attempt of the experiment, which didn’t go as expected; but as Dr. Patricelli said, “It was totally worth it for the video.” Yes it was! The male went nuts at the sight of the fake female and toppled her off the tracks, and we got to see it all. Lesson learned. In revised experiments the robot’s direction was reversed really fast if the male was getting too interested. And later work included a new design of robots, no longer tethered to tracks.
In addition to robots, data was collected from video cameras and digital audio arrays around the lek in order to record mating success, strut rates, and vocal quality. This tremendous amount of data was analyzed, as were data collected in more recent, differently designed experiments. Dr. Patricelli shared the following conclusions: 1) females will move out of the territory of an overly forward male; 2) males adjust their display effort in response to female presence (or absence) and proximity; the more responsive males (a social skill) can increase their display quantity without a decline in quality, and are more successful; 3) on average, both successful and unsuccessful males respond to female signals and cues and increase courtship effort during interactions with interested females; and 4) unsuccessful males bias their display efforts toward interested females while successful males perform their displays in approximately equal proportion between interested and uninterested females; unsuccessful and successful males may have different tactics in response to female signals.
Dr. Patricelli concluded that by measuring courtship tactics relative to fitness results in a more complete picture of how sexual selection affects displays, and may favor skills in responding to the social context, female behavior, and the events on the lek. Finally, the studies suggest that acquisition and allocation of energy is consequential to courtship success, with males making adjustments to optimize their efforts to achieve the most matings.
Studying Greater Sage-Grouse courtship behavior also contributes towards applied work on conservation efforts for both the sage-grouse and the habitat at large. Diet quality and foraging behavior affect the energy-intensive needs for courtship and mating success. Successful courting males maintain stable body mass through the duration of the mating season while unsuccessful males’ body fat dwindles. Why might that be? And are there connections that can be drawn to ecological concerns for other species and for land management policies? Dr. Patricelli and collaborators have been looking into the effects of different species of sagebrush, their chemical compositions, and their comparative toxicities and nutritional values for Greater Sage-Grouse, as well as the way the sage-grouse select and feed on them and navigate within and between remnant patches of sagebrush that have been separated by cheatgrass as a result of numerous and more intense wildfires. The data from these studies are in the process of being analyzed. One of the early interesting results on a California population group of sage-grouse seems to indicate that successful mating males select sagebrush species and proportions that are different from selections made by unsuccessful males. This might have implications for habitat restoration: it was found that successful males don’t seem to eat basin big sagebrush, the species widely used for restoration of Greater Sage-Grouse habitat.
Dr. Patricelli noted that the Greater Sage-Grouse has served as an important model system for studying and understanding evolutionary and behavioral biology for a very long time. Once consisting of more than 16 million birds, their population has declined to an estimated 200,000 to 500,000, and although the species has been the focus of conservation efforts, the population has continued to decline. Findings from these and continuing studies can provide information and analysis beneficial to wildlife and land management for both the Greater Sage-Grouse and other species that share the same habitat.
At 8:00 p.m., Vice President Doug Futuyma thanked Professor Patricelli for an absolutely wonderful lecture. He then hosted the Q&A session.
At the conclusion of the Q&A, Vice President Futuyma thanked Professor Patricelli again for a fascinating lecture. He closed the meeting with a reminder that this is the last meeting of the season and that the next meeting and lecture will be in September. He invited the audience to go to the Linnaean Society website to see the upcoming schedule of speakers.
At 8:20 p.m. the meeting was adjourned.
A recording of this meeting and lecture can be viewed in its entirety on the Linnaean Society of New York website.
Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary