The in-person portion of the meeting will be held at the Academy of Natural Sciences, BEES classroom (3rd floor).

Meeting agenda:
7:15 PM:  Zoom opens
7:30-8 PM: Club business
8 PM:  Presentation followed by questions (might start earlier if club business finishes earlier).

Please register for the meeting whether you will be attending in person or via Zoom. Then watch for the meeting link in your email. Disregard the meeting link if you will be attending in person.

Register here via Zoom

Chickadee Hybridization, Cognition and the Microbiome

Speaker: Amber Rice  (in-person)

When hybridization occurs, selection against hybrids can maintain species barriers. Learning and memory can be important for fitness in many species, but whether cognition is impacted by hybridization is not well understood. Black-capped and Carolina chickadees naturally hybridize, and also rely on learning and memory to cache and retrieve food as an adaptation for overwinter survival. My research on wild-caught adult chickadees indicates that hybrid chickadees show reduced spatial memory and problem solving skills. Even after controlling for variation in diet and rearing environment, we found that hybridization impacts multiple measures of cognition, but differently for males versus females. Much of this may be explained by genetic incompatibilities, but our work also suggests that chickadee gut microbiomes may be influencing their cognition. Our results provide insight into how hybridization and the microbiome may both be influencing cognition, and therefore contributing to the maintenance of this chickadee species barrier.

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Amber completed a BA at the College of Wooster in Ohio, followed by a PhD at the University of North Carolina. She first began working with birds during her postdoc at Uppsala University in Sweden. Amber started her faculty position at Lehigh University in 2011. Across her career, Amber has worked with study systems including plants, spiders, toads, and birds, but her interests have always centered around understanding how biodiversity arises and is maintained.