JEFFREY LUCAS

Professor
LILY G-308
494-8112

My lab hopes to understand the degree to which complex signals convey "information" among birds. Studies of bird communication, in turn, provide an excellent model for understanding our own language. We have focused most of our work on Carolina chickadees -- birds that have one of the most complex vocal systems of any species outside of humans. Indeed, chickadees are one of the few animals known to use syntax in their vocal signals. Expanding this work to include an analysis of the hearing capacity of chickadees and other bird species, we are the first lab to show that a birds ability to process sounds of different frequencies varies across seasons. This finding suggests that the neurophysiology of the auditory system in birds changes over the course of the year. Ultimately, the work could well give us some insight into the dynamics of our own auditory capacities.

Seasonal aspects of energy regulation in caching animals is another focus of our lab. We know that birds store more food in fall than at other times of the year, but we know little about the physiological basis of this seasonal trend. Attempting to understand the reason for this pattern, we are monitoring a suite of traits, from hormones, to brain-cell replacement rates, to overall behavior rates. Surprisingly, bird responses to impending winter conditions are remarkably similar to Seasonal Affective Disorder, a significant syndrome in humans