Field Notes

Publication

Beyond the Serengeti lion

Our new paper in Animal Behaviour asks what we miss when behavioral research relies too heavily on a small number of intensively studied populations. By comparing lions across ecological contexts, we argue for a more horizontal approach to understanding variation within species.

The paper grew from a collaborative effort to understand how the ecological settings in which lions live shape the behaviors we observe—and the conclusions we draw from them.

Read the paper →

Student milestone · MSc research

Candice Bazin successfully defends her MSc thesis

MSc intern Candice Bazin successfully defended her thesis and earned the highest thesis grade in her cohort.

Her research combined tracker reconstructions with biologging to investigate fine-scale lion hunting behavior, using complementary sources of evidence to ask what lions actually do during hunts rather than treating movement paths as behavior by default.

Public Scholarship

The most charismatic of cats

I contributed the chapter “The Most Charismatic of Cats” to The Last Lions from Smithsonian Books, bringing lion social behavior and ecology to a broad public audience.

Public-facing writing is one way I try to connect the questions that motivate field research with the wider fascination people have with lions—and with animal societies more generally.

Invited Talk

Big Cats, Bigger Questions

At the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, I spoke about using big cats to connect proximate mechanisms of behavior with broader ecological and evolutionary questions.

The central theme was one that continues to organize my research: lions are compelling not because they are lions, but because their flexible social system makes it possible to ask when different social strategies emerge and why.

Publication · Field Methods

At the crossroads of tradition and modern technology

Our paper in Frontiers in Conservation Science describes how Indigenous tracking and modern sensing technologies can be combined to study carnivores in low-density systems where direct observation is difficult.

The broader point is methodological but also conceptual: different forms of knowledge reveal different parts of behavior. Tracking, biologging, and direct observation become more powerful when they are treated as complementary rather than competing approaches.

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Publication

How groups sense the world

The eLife synthesis “Sensory collectives in natural systems” asked how groups acquire, combine, and act on sensory information.

That framework helped sharpen a question now central to my work: understanding collective behavior requires knowing not only where animals move, but what information is available to them before they make those movements.

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Student Research · Publication

From student project to publication

Victoria O'Connor's research on innovation and behavioral flexibility in African lions and snow leopards developed from graduate research into a peer-reviewed paper in Behavioural Processes.

It remains one of my favorite examples of what research mentorship can become when a student owns a real biological question and follows it far enough to contribute something new.

Read the paper →