Suzy Renn, Divisional Chair, Chair.DAB@sicb.org; Stephanie Campos Divisional Program Officer, DPO.DAB@sicb.org; Caitlin Gabor, Divisional Secretary, Secretary.DAB@sicb.org; Grace Zhong Student Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative
Message from DAB Leadership
A huge thank you to all of the presenters, attendees, and volunteers who participated in SICB 2025 in Atlanta! It was a great turn out. A special thanks to Mark Mandica who reached out and invited SICB for an incredible private behind-the-scenes tour of the Amphibian Foundation. What was originally planned for around 40 people turned into an impressive 225 visitors to the center.
First, we want to express our appreciation to the many participants who engaged with DAB at SICB 2025
- Student Mentoring Program participants, both students and mentors
- Best Student Presentation competition presenters, attendees, and judges
- DAB Members Meeting attendees
We value your involvement in DAB and extend an invitation to all DAB members to take part in upcoming initiatives! If you’re interested in exploring other ways to engage with SICB/DAB, please reach out to a member of the DAB Executive Committee. Moreover, if you have ideas for enhancing DAB, please share them with us.
Best Student Presentation Competitions
Thank you to everyone who participated in our 2025 Marlene Zuk and Elizabeth Adkins-Regan competitions, including students, judges, and attendees. This year’s events featured exceptional student research and strong engagement throughout DAB. Eight finalists emerged from 28 submissions to present in the Zuk Award special session, while thirty students competed in the Adkins-Regan Award for Best Student Poster Presentation. We are proud of both the outstanding quality of student research displayed in these competitions and the dedication of judges and DAB members to supporting student professional development.
The Marlene Zuk Award for best oral presentation was awarded to Janice Yan for her talk entitled “Sexual conflict, social networks, and the fitness consequences of female multiple mating”. Janice completed her PhD in Reuven Dukas’ Cognitive Ecology Lab at McMaster University. Janice studied sexual conflict in bed bugs and found that females don’t avoid males in group settings but prefer female social cues when tested individually. Additionally, they found that females inseminated weekly rather than daily lived longer with 50% more offspring demonstrating high costs to polyandry.
The Zuk Award session featured an outstanding group of high-quality presentations by DAB students. The other Zuk finalists were Aidan Schneider “Complex environments drive adaptive hunting strategies in mice”, Lin Yan “Linking ovarian development and mating strategies in jumping spiders”, Brett Hodinka “Uncoupling of mass loss, energy intake, and energy expenditure in a small passerine”, Paige B. Caine “Ant triage: Target prioritization and division of labor in fire ant rescue behavior” , Hannah Reeb “Evolution of an animal signal in relation to group size”, Emmy James “Feeling the heat: thermal plasticity changes competitive ability across a salamander hybrid zone”, and Rikki Serafina Laser discussed “Hot parents in your area: Abiotic and social environment influence parental behavior”. Congratulations to all the finalists on their remarkable achievement and for showcasing their hard work!
Emmy James received the Elizabeth Adkins-Regan Award for her poster “An experimental heat challenge uncovers individual variation in heat dissipation behaviors” Emmy is a PhD student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, advised by Dr. Elizabeth Derryberry. She studies avian thermoregulatory behavior to identify how populations respond to a warming world. In particular, Emmy focuses on variation in thermoregulatory behavior to determine if all individuals are good at coping with heat. She studies free-living tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) and their chicks, which are expanding southwards into warmer climates.
Gwen Sailer was the runner-up for the Elizabeth Adkins-Regan Award for her poster entitled “Artist meets architect: color nesting preference of Megachile rotundata”. Gwen is in the last year of her undergraduate studies at North Dakota State University. She is majoring in biological sciences with a minor in zoology. She has an interest in telomerase activity and phenotypic plasticity in birds. Over the summer of 2024, she was given the opportunity to participate in Pollination Nation’s REU program where she conducted research into the effects of cycloastragenol on telomerase activity in Megachile rotundata.
Congratulations to the awardees and finalists! A special thank you to the 24 judges who volunteered their contributions in evaluating and providing feedback for the posters.
DAB Mentoring Program
The DAB Mentoring Program was led once again by Dr. Rindy Anderson. Dr. Avery Russell coordinated a reimbursement for the meetup. We are now trying to co-ordinate the DAB mentoring program with the program wide mentoring efforts associated with SICB Broadening Participation Program registration. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Rindy and the volunteer mentors for making this year’s program a success! We encourage you to consider participating next year or to reach out if you’d like to help with organization efforts.
Submit Proposals for SICB Symposia
Every year at SICB, symposia generate significant pre-conference excitement and draw large crowds at the conference itself. Please consider submitting a symposium proposal for SICB 2027 in Pittsburgh, PA! Organizing a symposium offers an excellent way to highlight current research in your field, introduce emerging scientists to the SICB community, elevate diverse perspectives, and present inclusive and innovative work from your divisions. Symposium proposals for SICB 2027 in Pittsburgh will be due September 1st. SICB particularly values integration across divisions and representation from various career stages including tenure track faculty as well as postdocs and graduate students, and from different types of institutions. If you are interested in submitting a proposal but need guidance, we have an ideal resource available to help you! Check out the Symposium Organizer Guidebook, a very thorough guide to proposing and organizing a SICB symposium, complete with a suggested timeline! Generally, proposals should include the broad themes of the symposium, a list of tentative speakers and talk topics or titles, and divisions interested in supporting the symposium (simply email divisional POs to ask for their support). In addition, consider including an affiliated workshop, panel, or exhibit at the conference.
DAB supports symposia that highlight animal behavior across diverse animal systems and co-sponsors symposia that integrate animal behavior with complementary fields of research. We strongly encourage symposia that address diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Benefits of organizing a symposium include raising the visibility of your research area and the opportunity to publish symposium papers in Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB). If you have an idea for a symposium topic or questions about organizing a symposium, please reach out to DAB’s program officer, Stephanie Campos DPO.DAB@sicb.org, who can help you navigate the symposium proposal process.
Follow DAB on Social Media
Please follow us @sicb-dab.bsky.social on Bluesky and join the SICB Division of Animal Behavior group on Facebook. Brett Hodinka (@bretthodinka.bsky.social) is managing this and working hard to boost our social media presence and bring SICB DAB content to your feed. We also thank Lisa Surber-Cunningham (@LisaLSurber), and Mena Davidson.
ABS 2025
The 2025 Animal Behavior Society (ABS) annual meeting will be July 8-12 in Baltimore MD https://www.animalbehaviorsociety.org/2025/. ABD is DAB’s sibling organization, and SICB DAB is often well-represented there!
PROPOSED DAB BYLAWS AMENDMENT
Please look over our proposed edits to our Election bylaws and send any suggestions, edits or comments to Caitlin Gabor Secretary.DAB@sicb.org https://sicb.org/divisions/division-of-animal-behavior/
DAB Leadership Update
We welcome Suzy Renn as the new DAB Chair. She follows in the footsteps of Avery Russell, who did an outstanding job and is still finalizing a few details. Avery has found a way to extend the Mangum support program to assist DAB students and trainees who have exhausted their funding—keep an eye out for sign-ups around the time of registration. What a great addition to the DAB program!
Please Vote in the Upcoming SICB Election
DAB is electing a new Divisional Program Officer this year, and all DAB members, including students, are encouraged to vote! In addition, all SICB members are eligible and encouraged to vote for Society-wide positions. More information about the two DAB Program Officer candidates is below; the SICB-wide newsletter contains candidate biographies for Society-wide positions. The ballot can be accessed HERE.
A special thanks to the DAB Nominating Committee, composed of Dr. Lara LaDage, Dr. Christopher Clark and Dr. Rosyln Dakin for their work lining up candidates. If you are interested in running for DAB office or serving on a future nominating committee, please reach out to a member of the current DAB Nominating Committee or the current DAB Executive Committee. We encourage all DAB members to consider how to get involved!
Candidates for DAB 2025 Elections
Candidates for DAB Program Officer
Name: Michael Reichert
Current Position: Associate Professor, Oklahoma State University
Education: BS, University of North Carolina (2004); PhD, University of Missouri (2011)
Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, Oklahoma State University (2019-2024), Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, University College Cork (2015-2018), NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Humboldt-Universität Berlin (2013-2015), Postdoctoral researcher, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2012)
SICB Activities: DAB mentor (2025), Session Chair (2024, 2025), Symposium presenter (2021), Manuscript reviewer for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Other Memberships: Animal Behavior Society
Research Interests: Animal communication, bioacoustics, sexual selection, animal contests, cognition, behavioral energetics, amphibians, insects
Statement of Goals: SICB is one of my favorite conferences because it brings together such a broad group of biologists and there is always a strong presence of animal behavior research. I have been attending these conferences since I was a graduate student, and really appreciate the efforts the society makes to ensure the meeting is student friendly. I am excited to be nominated as Program Officer for DAB because I am interested in working to build intellectually stimulating and supportive conferences. My own research interests are broad and varied and I will bring this experience to build talk sessions that are cohesive and attractive to attendees across the society. I am also very interested in promoting symposia that support the integrative nature of the society to help build stronger connections between animal behavior and other fields. Finally, I will work to further the efforts of SICB and DAB to ensure broad participation and a supportive atmosphere for early career researchers. Thank you for considering me for this position.
Name: Jordanna Sprayberry
Current Position: Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, Chair of Neuroscience, Muhlenberg College
Education: B.S. Zoology University of Rhode Island, 1998; Ph.D. Biology University of Washington, 2005
Professional Experience: Assistant through Full Professor, Muhlenberg College (2008-now), PERT Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Arizona (2006-2008)
SICB Activities: Member since 2001; co-organized symposium “Pollinator-plant interactions in a changing landscape: embracing integrative approaches across scales” for SICB 2025; 2024 TAL-X Workshop facilitator “What is scaffolding and how does it improve student outcomes?”,; DAB Secretary 2009-1012; ad hoc BSP judge 2006+; BSP talk winner for DNB (2005); BSP talk winner for DAB (2004)
Other Memberships: (intermittent) International Society of Neuroethology, International Society of Chemical Ecology
Research Interests: I study the neuroethology of pollination. My current research is predominantly focused on bumblebees with studies ranging from the impact of behavioral state on color and odor integration to how odor pollution modulates foraging behavior, but I am an equal opportunity pollinator lover.
Statement of Goals: I have been a regular SICB attendee since early in my graduate studies, and have made the society my primary meeting since starting at a PUI in 2008. I am honored to have been nominated for the program officer position, and happy to serve DAB specifically and the society at large. The vast diversity of (inter)disciplinary topics available at SICB is both a great strength and a scheduling challenge. I look forward to tackling the complex puzzle that is organizing engaging sessions alongside symposia with other divisional program officers.