Plenary speaker this morning, theme was immune function and animal behavior. Talk was a bit too general for me, which was shared by a fellow eco-immunology student. I guess thats necessary for a talk of this kind, but was hoping to get more out of it than I did. Some interesting examples of direct trade-offs between stress and response to bacterial infection in crickets, though.
High competition in females comes with the term "role reversed species". Funny to hear that in relation to animals. Of course, any female can tell you that females are very competitive, just in a different way.
Female topi deer have intense competition for males in leks. Highly preferred males "become physically exhausted" and "sperm depleted" because all the females have synchronized estrus, lasting for about a day. Quite intense!
Talk from Caroline Drea on masculinized female spotted hyenas. I did a report on this phenomenon for my physiological ecology class. Google this, its pretty crazy.
Apparent this also happens in lemurs. Lots of pictures of lemurs "junk" (the actual term used in the talk).
Presenting at the second poster session of the meeting. It was very crowded, but I ended up getting a spot on the outside row, very nice. Only about 5 people came to my poster, 4 of them were my friends or professors. Very different from the response I have gotten at the last meetings, talked for 3 hours about the same poster at EEID. Oh well, I enjoyed talking to the few people that came by.
Pretty tired now, was at the meeting for 12 hours today. One more talk tomorrow and I'm done.
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