Annual conference on biology and behaviour
November 6, 2003
The SQEBC 28th annual conference will be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday, November 7, 8 and 9, 2003 at the McGill University Department of Biology. About one hundred experts on the biology and behaviour of "mice and men" will be welcomed at the Stewart Biology Building, 1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue (north end of Stanley Street, Peel metro) by McGill professors Louis Lefebvre and Donald L. Kramer, SQEBC treasurer and vice-president respectively.
Louis Lefebvre has always been interested in how bird populations transmit learning and cultural behaviours. He is currently trying to determine the non-genetic means by which new behaviours originate, and are maintained and transmitted in both Montreal pigeon and Barbados gray kingbird populations. A behavioural ecologist, Donald Kramer is currently interested in space use and movement in freshwater and marine fishes, rodents and domestic mammals. He studies topics such as habitat selection, frequency- and density-dependent distributions, exploration and sampling, resource defence, and the implication of these processes for the effectiveness of conservation reserves.
The meeting will start at 8:00 pm, Friday, November 7, with a talk by Nicola Clayton from Cambridge University, UK. She is world renowned for having demonstrated that birds are capable of planning where they will store food and remembering later where they hid it, a behaviour thought to be exclusive to human beings. Professor Clayton will speak on "Complex cognition in food-caching corvids."
The Saturday plenary session will start at 9:00 am with a lecture by Université de Sherbrooke professor Don Thomas, who will speak on "L'Écologie évolutive de la mésange bleue en Corse : le lien entre la physiologie, l'écologie et le comportement."
Professor Thomas's talk will be followed by a round table on "La Science, les médias et le grand public" with science writers Sophie Malavoy (Icotop and Zone Science), Pauline Gravel (Le Devoir), Pascal Lapointe (Agence Science Presse) and Véronik de la Chenelière (GREMM and Baleines en direct).
Both lectures and the round table will be held in Room S1/4 of the Stewart Biology Building.
Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning will be dedicated to 20-minute oral presentations and poster sessions on a variety of issues related to one of the following themes: population ecology, communities and ecosystem, ethics and well-being in captivity, traits of life history, habitat use and selection, food competition, answer to predation, changing biology, ecophysiology, and conservation biology.
The registration booth, located at the entrance of the Stewart Biology Building, will open at 5:00 pm, Friday, November 7. Registration fee: $150, students $35.
