| Awards and Outreach | -> | ABS Keynote/Fellow Lecutres 2000 |
Dr. Hugh Drummond, a research professor at the Instituto de Ecología in Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City, will be giving a Fellow's Lecture at the 37th annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. The meeting is sponsored by Morehouse College and Zoo Atlanta. Dr. Drummond's presentation will be based on twenty years of research on the reproduction of marine birds on Isla Isabel, an uninhabited, tropical island off the Pacific coast of Mexico. The talk is titled Controlling Siblings.
Dr. Drummond originally trained as a lawyer in his home country, England, worked in Applied Linguistics in Mexico City for several years, then earned his doctorate in Ethology and Comparative Psychology at the University of Tennessee. After that, he moved to the UNAM to establish an animal behavior research group in the Instituto de Biología. He then helped found the Instituto de Ecología, where the Laboratorio de Conducta Animal has slowly grown over the years to its current strength of four researchers and about thirty students - the largest animal behavior research group in Mexico. Dr. Drummond has supervised 33 undergraduate and graduate research theses, coordinated the UNAM's doctoral program in Ecology, and published more than fifty articles on the behavior of birds and reptiles. In recent years the Mexican government granted his group the administration of Isla Isabel, since which time they have struggled with the control and eradication of introduced fauna, offered environmental education to local fishing communities, and expanded their research programs.
When Dr. Drummond became acquainted with the blue-footed boobies on Isla Isabel, he was drawn by their conspicuous social behavior. Over the years, he and his students have studied aspects of the boobies' sex ratio, mating system, individual recognition and so on, but the major theme of the research program has always been the dramatic aggressive conflict between sibling chicks. Chicks of this species routinely peck their siblings viciously around the head and nape, frequently killing them through expulsion from the nest or enforced starvation. Two other species, brown boobies and brown pelicans, have also been studied, and have been found to exhibit similar behavior.
An intriguing aspect of sibling relations is the balance between conflict and cooperation, and this varies greatly among species. For example, the elder brown booby chick automatically kills its nestmate within a few days of hatching, whereas the elder blue-footed booby chick seems to husband its sibling as an expendable resource. In a blue-foot nest it is common for both chicks (sometimes all three chicks) to fledge, but when parentally-provided food is short, the elder chick«s aggression can intensify to a level where its sibling has no chance of survival. Dr. Drummond and his students have devoted considerable research effort to understanding the often rather gentlemanly social interactions that mediate the life-and-death conflicts of this booby's broodmates. In stark contrast with the all-out unremitting aggression of brown booby chicks, bluefoot broodmates establish a conspicuous dominant/subordinate relationship, in which much of the aggression consists of nonviolent ritualized displays, and each individual assumes the role of victim or oppressor. Thus the blue-footed booby has become a unique model for understanding the psychology of dominance-subordination, in an authentic context.
Every year since 1980, Dr. Drummond and his colleagues set up a tent camp on the shore of Isla Isabel, where they monitor about 1000 blue-foot nests during five months of the reproductive season. They have been supported over the years by the UNAM, the Consejo Nacional para Ciencia y Tecnología and the National Geographic Society. In the early years, Dr. Drummond and his students were completely dependent on local fishermen for transport and supplies, including food and fresh water from the coast, but during the last ten years the Mexican navy has supported the UNAM team by sending a boat to the island every two weeks. Banding has advanced to the point where roughly 90% of the birds breeding each year are already banded and in many cases their whole personal reproductive history is known from the time of hatching. Most research effort of the UNAM team is fieldwork, and the most frequent method is traditional direct observation with stopwatch and pencil, but early descriptive work was quickly followed up by field experiments and in recent years molecular and hormone assays have often been carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the U.S.A.
Before he got involved with animal behavior, Dr. Drummond was a keen rock climber and alpinist, and participated in the first (20-day) ascent of the superdirect route on the Troll Tind, Europe's highest vertical wall. Recently he renounced hiking on Mexico's high volcanoes in favor of mountain-biking through the country's deserts and forests, a sport he enjoys in the company of his twin sons and his wife, Sylvia Rojas.