Description: Advances in the Study of Behavior, Volume 57 highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on a variety of interesting topics, including Thinking Through Change: The Role of Environmental Factors in Shaping Vertebrate Cognition, Cold-Blooded Cognition: Recent advances in reptile cognition and their implications, Building by animals: myths and misunderstandings, and The Behavioral Ecology of Rapid Color Change in Fishes: Context, Diversity, and Open Questions.
Brief description: Jeff Podos is a Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He conducted his dissertation research under the guidance of Stephen Nowicki and Susan Peters, in the Department of Zoology at Duke University (PhD 1996). He then held a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Arizona, Tucson, in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, where he studied with Daniel Papaj. He also held a post-doctoral position at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia in Manaus, Brazil. In 2000 he took a position in the Biology Department at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and since 2011 has served as director of the UMass Graduate Program in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. His research program focuses on topics in animal communication, with particular emphasis on signal performance, development, and learning in songbirds. In addition to work on North American sparrows, he has a long-standing research project on Darwin's finches of the Galapagos Islands, addressing the interface of behavior, ecology, in species divergence. Additional collaborative research projects are addressing topics in Neotropical ornithology and bioacoustics. He has served editorship positions with three other journals: Animal Behaviour, Bird Behavior, and Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, and is currently President-Elect of the Animal Behavior Society.