photo credit: Nicholas Pattinson
PSA Award
FIELDWORK REPORT I am really grateful for the financial support provided to my overseas data collection. This is my second PhD year, and I have spent six months (September 2019 - March 2020) in the South African Kalahari desert investigating how heat stress may impact cognition in wild animals. Cognition is an animal’s ability to process and respond to information from the surrounding environment. Animals’ survival, reproductive success, and adjustment to environmental changes can depend on their cognitive performance. As temperatures are rapidly increasing, understanding the effect of heat stress on cognition has become crucial. In the Kalahari, I study a wild population of Southern pied babblers (Turdoides bicolor) that has been habituated to close human observation. Every day in the field I localize a group of babblers, approach them to weigh all the individuals (they jump on a scale to access a small food reward), perform behavioural observations and cognitive testing. To assess how hot temperatures affect cognitive performance, I test the same individual under a non-heat stress and a heat stress condition (identified from the display of heat dissipation behaviours, such as panting - you can see two individuals panting at the bottom left in the photo!).
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During this field season, I performed 226 cognitive tests, monitored 41 nests, and ringed 47 new individuals for identification in the study population. This is more than twice the data that I collected during my first field season, and it has been possible mainly thanks to the additional help of my two field assistants, Lina PeĂąa-Ramirez and Grace Blackburn. The PSA Fieldwork Travel and Data Collection Award has been fundamental to cover the flight costs for a field assistant. Now I am closer to answer my research question, which I hope will contribute to our understanding of how wild animal populations might adjust to climate change and inform mitigation actions.
Camilla Soravia PhD student Centre for Evolutionary Biology www.babbler-research.com
