Jesse Ellis
2005- 2006 CSIP Fellow

Research Interest:
Neurobiology and Behavior

I am currently finishing my fourth year of my Ph. D. in Neurobiology & Behavior. Since I was small, I have loved birds. My interest lead me to biology at Lewis & Clark College, and from there I turned to an interest in animal behavior. The questions I am asking in my current research are 1) why do animals use the number of signals that they do to communicate, i.e. why do some use many and some use few, and 2) how are those all those signals used, and how does that reflect the ecology and social structure of that species? I am specifically looking at the huge repertoire of the White-throated Magpie-jay, a Blue Jay look-alike that lives along the Pacific coast of Central America.

I hope to use examples of real-world animal communication systems (including our own) to pique students’ interest and get them asking questions. With a basic understanding of natural selection (that mathematical inevitability you get with variation and reproduction,) students can examine how animals select signals to communicate effectively. With some knowledge of a particular species’ natural history, we should be able to predict something about an animal’s chosen form of communication. Birds occur everywhere, and they are always talking about everything, so bird song provides an ideal window into the world of animal communication, and its ubiquity means that most students have already made some observations about it, whether they really know it or not. I hope to help students design answerable questions from their observations, and in the process understand the basic principles behind the “scientific method”. Dreaded words, those, to most students, but I believe that it is imperative that we as educators encourage the innate curiosity of students to ask questions. The scientific method comes naturally when people think critically about questions and use all available information and methods to answer them. Using resources available here at the Lab of Ornithology, both on the natural history of birds and about their vocalizations, I look forward to creating innovative curricula that help students of all interests learn to ask good questions.