On Thursday, August 31st at 12:00-1:00 PM in NLSN 1215, Dr. Jeff Lucas (Professor, SLHS) will be presenting “The duck project. Huh? What duck project? Glad you asked…” for SLHS’s “Seminars in Hearing Research” series. See the attached flyer for details! Please note the new location and time. There will not be a hybrid option this year; seminars will be held in-person only or via Zoom for long-distance speakers.

Abstract:   Next to chickens, Pekin ducks are one of the most important sources of poultry-derived meat.  Duck rearing obviously requires keeping relatively large numbers of ducks in relatively small areas.  This arrangement can result in various levels of physiological stress, which has impacts on animal welfare and also on productivity.  Our project on this topic has three phases. The first is to characterize the vocal system of Pekin ducks, something that surprisingly hasn’t been done before.  The second is to use the duck vocal system as a preliminary source of information about stress. This includes determining whether there is environment-dependent call syntax and whether the spectral properties of calls vary with the environment. ‘Environment’ includes both social environment and several types of ‘enrichment’. The third is to see if we can identify vocal elements that might be broadcast to the ducks to mitigate stress.