Juvenile animals occupy a different social niche than adults, being inexperienced and facing different social risks. I investigated how this "age of risk" affects the development of communication in juvenile plains zebras. Check out the manuscript here:

Read our full paper on how social roles within stable social groups and communicative flexibility may facilitate survival during the challenges of the Anthropocene. Many thanks to my collaborators @erin_isbilen and Dan Rubenstein:

Multimodal communication became simpler and less combinatorically complex, particularly in the costly social contexts of aggression and greeting, likely reducing the possibility of communicative misunderstandings when they cannot be afforded.

Mothers focused on foraging, while their juvenile's primary social partner shifted towards unrelated, non-maternal females in the harem.

We found that, while foraging time increased, social bonds remained robust. Furthermore, individuals changed their behavior in accordance with their need and social niche. Stallions spent more time greeting extra-harem males, which likely facilitated female grazing.

But then I realized the perfect natural experiment this drought offered to investigate how zebras modified their social behavior in response to the drought. We expected that social behavior would fall to the wayside in favor of survival. The truth was far more complex.

Extreme weather events, such as drought, are becoming an increasing challenge that animals must face in the Anthropocene. When severe drought struck my field site in Laikipia Kenya in 2022 I was certain that would spell the end of my dissertation.

The Warder Clyde Allee Award honors the best student paper at #ABS2024. Please join us in congratulating our Honorable Mention, Dr. Severine Hex!

I am delighted and honored to share that yesterday I defended my dissertation and earned my PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. Many thanks to my advisor Dan Rubenstein for all of his guidance over these 6 years.

I am pleased to share that I was awarded honorable mention for my Allee presentation on how sociality enabled zebras to survive a severe drought. It was an honor to share my work alongside the other incredible scientists in this symposium. Keep an eye out for the manuscript.

Joint attention is considered one of the key capacities underlying human cooperation. We have studied it non-human primates and domestic animals like dogs, but what about zebras? We investigated whether the headbob (below) is used for joint engagement. https://t.co/2td5Gsv01W

Communication is complex, made all the more so by being fundamentally multimodal. My new paper introduces a framework for using network methods to analyse communication as an interconnected system, using plains zebras as a case study. https://t.co/LbKw0txweb

Check out the @biorxivpreprint for this study here: https://t.co/sKzYqYLNwv. Thanks to coauthors @HexSeverine and Dan Rubenstein & to our funders @Simons_SOF & @NSF! (13/13)

One of the highlights of working the plains zebras is their attitudes, which apparently begin to emerge early in their ontogeny. Here is one of our focal foal "investigating" a foal from another harem. @erin_isbilen

2022 Field Season Has Begun: Where are the Harems Now?

The New York Times reporting on work by recent Ph.D graduate Katerina Faust, who took my lab's focus on social learning in a new direction with her research on the role of animal personality in pair bonding and parenting. Her new papers are in press and coming out soon!

The word "harem" has been used to describe many mammalian social systems, but are they all the same? I am pleased to share this paper on classifying the social diversity in mammalian UM-MF units. Huge thanks to co-authors @kaiatombak and Dan Rubenstein.

https://t.co/PJVyRrjhTe Featuring a very adorable video from my first field season of a yearling female attempting (and failing) to gain access to an infant.

https://t.co/bFNyuhH0Wu A fun one today with a (unresolved) discussion on why third-party interventions in sexual contexts may occur in plains zebras.

A few updates on the harems, including the fate of MI6 and numerous gratuitous baby zebra pictures.