There are all these amazing old essays about these bizarre, arachnid groups with observations from the field that people just haven't followed up on. And so I often find those little nuggets and then say, "Oh, that sounds so cool." (upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to the Animal Behavior Podcast. I'm Amy Straps. In today's episode, I speak with Dr. Eileen Hebbetz, a professor in the school of biological sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She's also a visiting professor at the National University of Cordova in Argentina. Eileen is the current president of the Animal Behavior Society. Her research is driven by a fundamental interest in understanding the evolution and function of animal diversity. She primarily works with arachnids to ask questions and explore evolutionary puzzles around three main themes, animal communication, sensory biology, and mating systems. In this episode, we talk about the sensory world of arachnids, their extreme mating behaviors, including sexual cannibalism, and the different ways that we define learning in the field of animal behavior. Then, after the break, we talk about how basic science provides a critical foundation for innovation and discovery and the importance of meaningful science communication. We close by hearing about Eileen's role as the new animal behavior society president. I hope you enjoy. Let us know what you think at
[email protected]. (upbeat music) My guess today is Dr. Eileen Hebbetz, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the current president of the Animal Behavior Society. Eileen's research integrates behavioral experimentation, neural techniques, and evolutionary approaches to explore questions about animal sensory systems, animal cognition, extreme mating strategies, and more. In addition to her primary research, Eileen is deeply committed to science communication and public outreach, and she's published in these areas, which we'll get to talk about later in the show today. Eileen, welcome to the Animal Behavior Podcast. Thanks for being here. - Thanks so much for having me, Amy. - In your work, you spend a lot of time thinking about the sensory world of arachnids, which presumably is quite different from our own sensory reality. Can you talk about how you approach research into this different world? I think one of my biggest challenges is to figure out what that sensory world looks like because it's so different from our own. So a lot of my research asks questions about how arachnids in particular, how and why they use different sensory modalities to communicate, and in doing that, I really need to understand how the physical environment in which they live might transmit different signals that take on different forms, how the sensory system of the receivers might be able to perceive those and how things might interact both at the peripheral sensory system, but also at kind of higher order processing systems. - What are the main communication modalities that arachnids use? - One of the most obvious to us sensory systems that a lot of arachnids use is vibratory communication. So they have a variety of ways of making sounds that they can couple with whatever they're standing on, which we call a substrate, and they can transmit these signals through the substrate. They also do some crazy courtship dances. So some of these spiders have all sorts of ornaments and they wave their legs and they do these cute little dances to entice the ladies. And so those are presumably visual components. So that's something we're a lot more familiar with being mammals were quite visual. I think for me one of the most intriguing hearts of my research is the potential for finding new sensory modalities or sensory modalities that are kind of outside of our perceptual world. Near field sound or air particle displacement is something that we now think a lot of arachnids might use, but it's hard for people to even wrap their mind around what does that mean? What is near field versus far field sound? How do you even identify a novel sensory modality? Yeah, it's a great question. And the example I can give is through careful experimentation. So for example, in some of the wolf spiders that I work with in the genus Gizakosa, these are small ground dwelling wolf spiders that are really common throughout North America. And many of them have these songs that they produce, where they produce vibrations, coupled to the substrate. They also have ornaments on their legs that they wave. And so years and years and years ago, I developed an experimental protocol where I could target each of those sensory modalities independently and remove them and look at how females respond to courting males. So we can do this two by two design, where we have visual signals present absent, vibratory signals present absent. We could put a male on a female together and look at what their mating outcome is. And so we've done this for a variety of species and found the relative importance of visual or vibratory signaling, the interaction between them, but there was one species, Gizakosa retorsa, where the males have dark femurs, like jet black femurs, and on their first pair of legs, and the rest of their leg is pretty light. And they do this extended four leg wave that is so fast, it almost looks like a strobe light. So because of the contrast between the black and the light. So they do this really, really, really fast leg wave. They do this push-up display. They have very characteristic sounds and dynamic visual movements. And when we ran this species through our experimental design, we found that in the absence of vibratory signaling and in the absence of visual signaling, they made it just as much as they did in the presence of both. That's where we started thinking, okay, there's something else going on here that we're missing. And that is where we started to think about the potential for near field sound. So I actually have a graduate student right now, this summer testing the role of near field sound in courtship signaling in this particular species. - Can you define near field sound? - Near field sound is the region close to a sound source where the sound pressure and the acoustic particle velocity are not in phase. And so you don't get these pressure waves, but you still have air particle displacement. - Wow, very cool. In addition to looking at sensory systems of these animals, you also look at mating behavior, including extreme mating behavior. What do you classify as extreme? - Extreme mating behavior often involves the death of one of the mating partners. It's often the male and sometimes it is self-induced. So self-sacrifice in males and other times it is female cannibalism where the females consume the males and it's almost an obligate part of the mating system. - How common is this in arachnids? And if it is common, why do you think this is a common strategy within this group specifically? - It's not uncommon. I would argue that we don't know how common it is. There's more than 49,000 described species of spiders. And when you look at the literature, there's maybe four genera of over 4,000 that have been studied with a lens on their behavior. And so there's a lot we don't know. What we do know is that there are different groups of spiders where it has evolved independently. And there are other taxa, most notably praying mantids where you also see similar behavior. It's probably a little too early yet to really say why in these groups we see it and we don't in other groups. But I think part of it has to do with the fact that these are voracious predators. Some of median and droidies work has shown that for males, it's actually in the red back spider, it's really unlikely that you're ever gonna find another female. And so if you can get any advantage of mating with this female, if you sacrifice yourself and that female makes more babies, bigger babies, then it's to your advantage because you might never find a female again. But what we're finding with the fishing spiders is that piece of it is not there. Females and males are super common. It's really easy for a male to find another female. I guess I think that's one of the most exciting areas of my research right now is in this extreme mating system evolution and taking an evolutionary comparative perspective. I hope is gonna shed light on how and why we see that in certain groups and not others. (upbeat music) You do work across a lot of different arachnid species and you perform both field work and lab work. How do you identify a good candidate species to look into these different questions? And then how do you go about collecting them and studying them? - I guess I rely a lot on natural history to guide my choice of species. I think that's kind of where my initial passion and love for biology came in is just learning more about the natural history of different animals. And so with arachnids in particular, there are a lot of different species.
all these amazing old papers, essays about these bizarre, arachnid groups with observations from the field that people just haven't followed up on. And so I often find those little nuggets and then say, "Oh, that sounds so cool. Now I want to go to the field and I want to find some of those animals and I want to follow up on these observations and take a more streamlined hypothesis driven approach to asking questions about these observations that people have made often decades ago." I think a lot of animal behaviorists probably like to go back and look at those old natural history notes, both because they can be very poetic and beautiful and also because they can have a lot of insight that we don't always get the way we read current papers. Moving on, one area in which you've done a lot of work is looking into cognition and learning in these arachnid groups. We don't always hear about cognition and learning studies in arachnid since most of the traditional examples are invertebrate groups. How does learning and cognition in arachnids compare to what we know in other more well-studied vertebrates? Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I'm fascinated with the sensory processing neural systems of arachnids and I love the challenge of seeing what other vertebrates that are considered highly intelligent animals can do and then to see if arachnids can do the same thing. And in many cases, they can. And other arthropods can as well. The early work in arachnid cognition really focused on jumping spiders and this is work by Robert Jackson and more recently Fiona Cross, Elizabeth Jacob, and they showed that these jumping spiders were incredibly sophisticated in their hunting strategies. I kind of came in saying, okay, jumping spiders can do these things, but what can other arachnids do? What can wolf spiders do? What can amblipidgets do? And I found almost without exception that when I look for evidence of learning, I find it. I want to link this back to the communication displays you were talking about earlier with elaborate multimodal courtship dances and vibratory signals. Do we know if there's a learning component to this communication behavior? Like we hear about with bird song, for example, or is this purely innate behavior? Right, the display itself, the courtship display, is can be produced by individuals that have been raised in isolation their entire lives. So there is no kind of learning from up here. In fact, for the most part, there's not a whole lot of overlap of generations, but with that said, some of the work out of our lab has shown that males can learn, for example, they can learn what substrate is more effective at transmitting their signal based on feedback that they get from the females. When they get positive feedback from a female, they're more likely to court on that substrate that they received feedback on. And that was worked done by Laura Sullivan-Beckers when she was a postdoc with me. It's really cool research. In addition to the learning on the signal producing side, you've looked into how females or receivers are making decisions about what signals to prefer, and that that can be influenced by learning and experience. Can you tell us a little bit about that very cool study? Yeah, so this is a study where you know at the time there was a lot of mate choice learning work happening, primarily in guppies and some in quail, so some birds and fish. And the idea was that the four individuals were mature or were ready to mate, experiences that they had might influence their subsequent mate choice. And so in wolf spiders, what's really kind of sets them up for a system like this to potentially be really important is that males mature in general before females by at least a week sometimes more. So if you imagine in the field, you know, in some areas these spiders are incredibly dense. So hundreds of spiders in a very small area, many of them are mature males. All they need is a queue to start courting and they're making potential advances at these females who aren't yet mature, who are just sub-adults. And so I wanted to know if that experience that seems likely to be happening in the field would impact a female's subsequent mate choice. So I did an experiment in the lab that basically mimicked that and I looked at who they made it with. And the results are just shockingly clear. So the females preferred familiar males. So whatever form they saw, they made it more with those males. But then what I thought was kind of the cherry on top was that they cannibalized unfamiliar males significantly more. Another reason why spiders are so cool is because you have this added selection pressure of cannibalism where if you're not successful, you might not just not get a mate, but you might actually become a meal. That's so interesting. My understanding is that the cannibalism is to enhance your attractiveness sort of or a form of investment, right? But if the ones that are being eaten aren't the ones that are going to be passing on their genes, that decoupling feels a little bit confusing. So in some systems, the cannibalism is a direct benefit to females in these terminal investment strategies, but typically that cannibalism happens after mating. So we call that post-copyletory cannibalism. But pre-copyletory cannibalism, we know that's very common. And some people propose that that's actually a form of mate choice, where if a male doesn't make the cut, he just gets eaten. Extreme mate choice. Wow. High risk, I reward, I guess. You said that the females are highly predatory. So is feeding on a male, that's just a meal? It's not necessarily tied to mating in courtship. That's like the million dollar question is how much is when it happens before mating, is that a female recognizing that that's a male, but a low quality male, and so eating him, or is that a female, you know, who is hungry and looking for a meal irrespective of who it is? So I think that that question is not solidly answered empirically yet. I want to revisit this idea of cognition. One paper that you worked on with a number of other people, the title is "Embracing Multiple Definitions of Learning." Can you talk about how you define learning in your systems, and how having these very definitions of learning may create challenges within our field? Yeah, that paper is a really fun one to talk about because that paper was the result of a back when nessent was the thing, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, there was a working group. So a group of people across disparate fields were brought together, and in one of the discussions we were talking about learning. And so these are people working, you know, spanning taxa from birds to um, unnerens, there were some people doing human work, obviously arachnids, hymenopterans, bees, so there was a wide variety of taxa represented, and we found ourselves frequently getting into lively discussions about what is and is not learning. And we quickly realized that we were all coming from very different perspectives, and it was really hard to make any progress in any of our conversations because we each had a different idea in our heads of what learning was. And so we said, "You know what? Let's go to the literature and see what other people say learning is." And so that's essentially what this paper is, is that we each kind of went out in a different realm of study and dug up definitions of learning and found that, "Yeah, they're all over the board." Wow, that's something so central to the field of animal behavior. Right. And so so many people like to say that, you know, this group learns and this group doesn't learn, or this group has, you know, higher cognitive capacity than this group based on learning studies, but it's not super common for people that actually define what they mean by learning. And so for example, the study I was just talking about, you know, I think in my, I don't remember the title now, but I remember that throughout the paper, I initially wrote the paper and talked about female mate choice learning, that females were learning preferences of mates as sub adults. And reviewers did not like that language. And so I changed it to experience dependent mate choice. And so in many of my subsequent publications, I talk about experience dependent changes in behavior, but many definitions of learning, that's how you define learning is experience dependent changes in behavior. But as someone who studies arachnids I can't readily
use the word learning because reviewers will just bark at it. So just to be clear, how do you define learning? Experience dependent changes in behavior. You know, a neural definition of learning, approximate definition is probably the truest, but there are very few systems in which we can actually look at what's happening in the brain in response to these experiences and changes that are happening. And so from a behaviorist's point of view, when we're looking at the superficial outputs of behavior, the easiest definition to work with empirically is experience dependent changes in behavior. So did the nessent group made up of researchers from disparate taxa eventually converge on a consensus definition of learning? No, we didn't really. We ended by saying, you just need to define what you mean, that in a paper, when you use that term, you need to be really clear what you mean when you're using that term. But you know, I think one of the things that we pointed out too is that because there's different terminology that people feel they have to use, I think sometimes the broader pictures and the patterns that might emerge, we miss. Because when you do literature searches on learning, you might not get any of the experienced dependent, you know, literature, where it might be that that would satisfy whatever definition of learning you're looking for. And so I still think it's very problematic that there are these different uses of the term. I think, you know, by defining it initially, that helps readers understand what the authors are talking about, but I think it really greatly limits our ability to see bigger picture patterns. One group that you've done a lot of work on in the area of learning is Ambla Pigeons. Can you tell me a little bit about what you found in some of the cool learning studies you've done on Ambla Pigeons? I'll start by saying that Ambla Pigeons are a group that, well, first of all, they're my favorite animal by far. They're so cool. So they are a racnitz, but they're in their own order. And the order is Ambla Pige. They go by a couple different common names, Whip Spider or Tailless Whip Scorpion, neither of which I like because they are neither a spider nor a scorpion. And I think it's just confusing. I tend to just call them Ambla Pigeons. They are unique in that they're really dorsow eventually flattened. So all arachnids have eight legs. They being an arachnid have eight legs, but they only walk on six. And their first pair of walking legs are elongate into these incredibly, incredibly long, very thin, heavily articulated legs that they can kind of bend in every possible direction. And these legs are covered in sensory hairs. And so these are called antenna form legs because they function very much like an insect antenna. And then at the front of their body, they have really big, armored, spined pedipelps. And they use those for catching prey. So they look a little bit scary to most people. They are completely nocturnal. There were some basic descriptions of their brains that were done, you know, again, decades ago that suggested that they have a part of the brain called the mushroom body that's really big and really convoluted. And some of the work that Nick Strathfeldt, who is kind of, you know, one of the world experts on brain morphology and arthropods, he suggested that these mushroom bodies of Ambla Pigeons were relative to the body size of the Ambla Pigeon among the largest mushroom bodies of any arthropod. And in insects, we know mushroom bodies and mushroom body size correspond to learning and memory capacities in insects. So there's been a lot of work done in bees and a lot of work done in ants. And so, you know, by comparison, Ambla Pigeons should be super smart, just based on their neuroan enemy. So one of the first studies we did to test their learning capacity was kind of a, we had two goals. One was to test their learning, but another was to look kind of explore their sensory system a little bit. So if they could distinguish different textures and if they could learn to distinguish these textures. So this was work done by Roger Santa when he was a postdoc in my lab. And he designed this brilliant little study that basically associated different grains of sandpaper with openings to a crevice. And individual Ambla Pigeons were trained to learn that one grain of sandpaper was always associated with an open crevice versus the other. And he did a series of training trials and then a test trial to show that yeah, they learn and they can remember this distinction for fairly long periods of time. And since then, we've done a lot of work with collaborators at Bullin Green State University, Dan Wigman and Vern Bigman and their graduate student Patrick Casto working on navigation in Ambla Pigeons. And just showing that they are incredibly good at finding their way home in really heterogeneous dense habitats. And we're trying to figure out what sensory systems they use for this navigation. And it's really fun work. Thanks, Eileen. Let's pause now for a quick break. When we come back, we'll shift gears a bit away from your particular research program and talk about some broader topics in the field of animal behavior. First, here's a two-minute takeaway. Hi, my name is Emily Ray and I'm a first year PhD student in Karen Maruska's lab at Louisiana State University. Filial cannibalism occurs when a parent consumes their offspring in his present in a range of tax set, including birds, spiders, and fishes. Despite its widespread occurrence, how the brain prevents or triggers filial cannibalism is unknown. The mouth-breeding African sigloid fish Estatotlopia Bertone is an ideal model to investigate the control of filial cannibalism. Females brewed young in their mouths for about 14 days and then provide post-release maternal care by protecting their fri and their mouth when threatened. Adult abertone also cannibalized fri, so it's important that females and fri recognize each other during the post-release maternal care fees. Mothers must recognize their own fri to avoid eating their young and fri must recognize their mothers to avoid swimming towards an unfriendly mouth. Parent offspring recognition is critical to avoid maladaptive filial cannibalism, but which sensory signals are used and how those signals are processed in the brain are unknown. The overall goal of my research is to determine which sensory signals drive parent offspring recognition and to identify its neural correlates. Preliminary data suggests that both chemo-sensory and visual stimuli from fri may be necessary for mothers to recognize their fri and I am currently analyzing neural activation patterns. Parental care evolved independently in many animals and because fish are the largest and most diverse group of vertebrates, identifying the mechanisms of parent offspring recognition in a fish will have important implications for our understanding of the selective pressures that shape the evolution of parental care and for how species may adapt to our rapidly changing world. [Music] And we're back. A lot of your work would be considered basic research. Tell us why to you, basic research is important. I think basic research is the foundation of innovation and discovery. It's very challenging to make novel discoveries without basic research. I think that the natural world around us has been here for billions of years. Many of the animals on our planet have been here for hundreds of millions of years and they have experienced lots of things. They've experienced droughts, floods, volcanoes, you know, predation and the way that they have adapted the strategies that they've used to survive. I think offer humans basically endless solutions to many of the challenges we face today. And I think that we don't take advantage enough of what nature has already solved or is solving to help us solve our own local and global challenges. The way to get that information is to do the basic research, to go out and really learn what solutions did nature come up with? How are these animals doing these things? And I really think that that's the only way that true paradigm shifting research innovation discovery is going to happen. And there are lots of examples of it, what we all rely on when we do field work for raincoats and boots and everything. And the reason Gore-Tex is so great is because it's waterproof and it's breathable. And Gore-Tex was fashioned after plastrons of insects, which are these structures that are waterproof yet breathable. When you look at termites in the way that they build their mounds and the orientation and the venting of their different
chambers so that it can stay cool during the hot hours and warm when it's cold. You know, there are so many things that we can learn from the world around us in all aspects, from health to architecture to, you know, even technology recording devices. The sensory systems of spiders are incredible. They can detect vibrations. They can detect aeroparticle movement if we start to, you know, use bio mimicry to use the sensory systems of these animals. In fact, the hearing aid was fashioned off of the fly hearing, these parasitoid flies that attack crickets. So I could go on and on, obviously, but there are so many examples of where basic research has led to really important discoveries that are relevant to our well-being and our lives. And I think that there's much more to be discovered and that that's, we can't forget about the basic research. Not that everybody needs to do it, but I think we need a good foundation of basic research always happening so that we can understand our natural world more. I'd like to talk now about something that's become a bit of a hot topic across science disciplines and that's science communication. In addition to your innovative research program, your committed science communicator and recently received an Innovation Development and Engagement Award from the University of Nebraska system for extending your academic expertise beyond the boundaries of the university in ways that have enriched the broader community. With so many unanswered questions about our acronyms out there, why have you made science communication a priority? So I think it's really important for everybody, no matter what their career path, no matter what their age even, to understand what science is and how science works. So science is important in every aspect of our life, from deciding what food to eat, from seeking medical attention and making decisions about medications, about procedures, vaccines. I mean, science is pervasive in decision-making in our lives. And one of the things that I often see missing is that science is a process. That aspect of science is not often discussed with the public. Over my career, I have seen the opportunities available for scientists to engage with the public. So being someone who works on a rack nids, it's when it comes up in conversations, when people find out that I work on spiders and other arachnids, certain people are really intrigued and start to ask questions. And it became clear to me really early on that that is a tremendous opportunity to talk about general scientific concepts and the importance of science to people who normally would not engage in scientific discussions. And with youth in particular, I think it's so incredibly important. So the fact that science is a process and that we're constantly gaining knowledge and that's changing our, sometimes our information that we have. Sometimes it's questioning previous assumptions that we've built. I think we've seen it over the last year and a half. How important it is for people to understand that science is a process. So we just look at the mask mandates and you know, it has changed a lot over the course of a year and a half. And the reason it has changed is because new information, new data has become available at different times. And so that has caused scientists to relook at the data and make new decisions and new recommendations. And I think for people unfamiliar with that process of science, that just seems they lose trust. They lose trust in scientists. They lose trust in science. And we can't have that, right? That's a great point that the changes and the information we have available to scientists, that's proof that the process is working and that gives us more confidence in the system that as new data comes out, new policies are put in place based on that information. But to people unfamiliar with that process, it seems like flip-flopping or like it doesn't even matter because it keeps changing. And that's risky. Have you always been interested in science communication or is this the more recent part of your work? I would do, you know, spider walks with the public. I would meet with Girl Scout troops. I would, you know, always share my enthusiasm for arachnids with people. I didn't know it was called science communication. I didn't know it was called engagement. But I just loved arachnids. I love spiders and I wanted to share my love. It wasn't until I had kids. And I started taking them to various science-related events at museums, at zoos. Often with live animals, you would just see these kids. My mind included get so incredibly excited to see these animals, to touch these animals, to hold them. And it would often just stop there. But then I would find myself with my background that I have, providing this back dialogue to my kids about whatever it was we were seeing. And why it was so cool and why it was so important and how it relates to, you know, these general concepts in evolution or biology. And I would often then start to have other kids that would come up and start listening to me and parents that would turn to me. And I just kind of realized that there is just this desire among the public for this information in a way that we just weren't giving it to them. We were underplaying what they were capable of. And when you see these families come where these kids are just sponges and they want to learn, they want to listen, they want to hear the parents maybe not. But because their kids are interested, then they start coming forward and they get engaged. The reward from that is just unlike any other reward I had ever experienced in academia. And so it was just something that I started to actively devote time to, to developing, to getting grant funding for and helping other scientists kind of find their voice and their passion. Not only do you engage in science communication, but you teach it and you publish on it. Can you tell me about how you actually measure or quantify the impact you're making in doing science communication? One of the challenges for a lot of scientists who communicate sciences that they don't take that same scientific rigorous approach to it. And they think, oh, I went and talked to a first grade class. So and it seemed like it went great. And so what I what I did was fantastic. You know, we're not trained in science communication. And so how do we know if what we did was fantastic or how can we improve if we don't know the impact we've had. And so so for me, the biggest kind of light bulb that that illuminated my life of science communication is finding partners in evaluation and assessment. Whether that be social scientists or, you know, professional evaluators who this is their training, you know, they have gone to school. They all of their research is about best ways of assessing impacts of the things like what we're doing. I applied for a program that is no longer around at NSF, which is really too bad, but it was it was a supplement. If you had a funded grant, you could apply for a supplement that was CRPA. So it was connecting researchers with public audiences. And if you submitted one of those, you needed to have an evaluation paragraph. And I didn't even know what that meant at the time. So this was like in 2012. And I found out through colleagues that we had an office at UNL called the Bureau of Sociological Research, who like their sole purpose is to help people figure out evaluation and assessment plans for their projects. And so I that was the first time I teamed up with them. And they have been in particular my colleague Trish Wong-Kill, you know, I have learned exponentially about different not only different methods of assessment, but how you need to think about all of that before you even come up with your communications strategy. There's a whole other way of approaching science communication where I used to just go in and talk kind of like what I'm doing today. So maybe this isn't going to be the most effective podcast, but you know, I really got thinking a lot about like what are my goals? And some of my publications now have been on the importance of scientists coming up with goals of science communication before you even start to come up with a strategy. And then I think once you have your goals, you have your expected outcomes, and then you can figure out how you should assess that and how you can then look back and see whether you know, you need to tweak some things or how successful you were. So I guess like does a super long answer to say that find social scientists, find collaborators,
who are trained in assessment and evaluation and your world will completely change in terms of figuring out how to assess your science communication impact. I want to be sure to ask you a few general questions. To start, why do you study animal behavior? I study animal behavior because I am just fascinated by the world around us and I want to understand it more. I really am just intrigued and curious about how things got to be the way they are and behavior is a really fun, dynamic, observable thing to engage with and for me, one of the most interesting aspects of animals. What excites you about the future of animal behavior? I right now, at this current moment, am incredibly excited about diversifying the field of animal behavior. I think that there's enthusiasm, there's momentum, there's initiatives towards increasing the diversity of animal behavior researchers and I think with that increased diversity is going to come diverse taxonomic groups, different questions, different approaches and I think that it's really going to open up the field in ways that we can't even fathom right now. I am hopeful that even by the time this podcast errors were already making more progress and I think now is it feels like the change is real and I really hope that the change is real and that is by far what I'm most excited about for the field is I think that going back to the basic science and the opportunities for discovery, I think the more diversity we have in researchers and different backgrounds and different points of view and different experiences, I think that's how we're really going to expand our science, our research and our discovery. You've recently became the president of the animal behavior society. What do you see as the role of the ABS president and what do you see ahead for the future of the society? I have been blown away at the new initiatives that the animal behavior society has been undertaking in the last couple years and I am so excited to be able to make sure that they keep running, to push them forward and to expand on some of those initiatives. So as you know Amy, the Twitter team is phenomenal. The things that the ABS Twitter team has done are incredibly innovative paradigm shifting. You guys ran a Twitter conference that reached millions of users. There are so many things that the diversity equity inclusion initiatives that are happening in ABS. We now have an officer that's part of the executive committee, Chris Show, which I'm really excited about. I think every single committee that's part of animal behavior now has this broader view, this push towards increasing diversity equity and inclusion. It's been amazing to see how much can happen in a year. I think Esteban shoes are really, really hard to follow. I'm actually quite intimidated by all of the things that he have done, but I'm excited to make sure that they all keep moving forward and that we can maybe even come up with our own new initiatives. That's a great forward looking note to end on. Dr. Eileen Hebbets, thank you so much for joining us today. I enjoyed our conversation. Thank you. The animal behavior podcast is produced by me, Amy Strauss and Matthew Zippel. If you like what you heard, please subscribe wherever you're listening now, leave us a rating or review and share us with your friends and colleagues. You can contact us at
[email protected] and find us on Twitter @animalbehavepod or just search our full name. Our theme song is by Sally Street, assistant professor and evolutionary anthropology at Durham University in the UK. You can find her on SoundCloud under the artist's name Rainbow Road. Musical transitions by Andregel Solvsch, a researcher at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University. His Twitter handle is @Fireyangelsfeld. Our logo was designed by Adeline Johon Montaille, a master student in ecology and evolution. You can find a link to her website in the show notes. The animal behavior podcast is produced with support from the animal behavior society. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time.
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