Dr Alexandra Jebb De Calais

Overview
My current research interests revolve around vocal cues, bioacoustic research methods, social cooperation and kin recognition. However, in the past I have also had projects revolving around the selective processes acting on important life history traits and mechanisms of biomolecular stress (oxidative).
Kin Recognition in Long-tailed Tits
As a Post-doctoral Research Associate I work as part of the UKRI-funded project: Constraints on adaptation in social animals: kin recognition mechanisms and the fitness consequences of discrimination rules (PI: Professor Ben J Hatchwell, University of Sheffield). My portion of the project involves working principally with vocal cues and recording individual long-tailed tits in a long-term, field population west of Sheffield. Our general aims within this project are: 1) to create vocal profiles for individual birds spanning multiple generations, 2) identify the level of social association that vocal signatures are associated with using machine learning methods and 3) investigate the variance in, and selection acting on, vocal traits as well as researching the mechanism behind this particular kin recognition cue.
Although most of our work to date has currently been observation-based, in the coming year we will investigate the contextual nature of the long-tailed tit vocal repertoire through experimental approaches within the breeding season. Furthermore, we will be expanding into the effects of seasonality on bird calls to quantify observed variation in previous field seasons.