Jeffrey R. Lucas

PULSe Contributor - not currently hosting students for laboratory rotations or recruiting students in the laboratory

Current Research Interests:

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. We have been studying signal complexity in chickadees and the related tufted titmice in the context of the complexity of their social networks. Expanding this work to include an analysis of the hearing capacity of chickadees and other bird species, we were the first lab to show that subcortical processing of sounds varies across seasons. This finding suggests that the neurophysiology of the auditory system changes over the course of the year. Subsequent work has shown fine scale tuning relative to the properties of speciesspecific song. Finally, we are expanding the work on hearing in songbirds to include eagles, with an eye to finding stimuli that can be broadcast from wind turbines with the hopes of reducing mortality rates associated with turbine-bird collisions.

Selected Publications: