What an incredible day of talks. The day started off with a plenary talk (one by an invited speaker that all the attendees go to) about social relationships between baboons. They'd found that the amount that a baboon engaged in social interactions with other baboons was correlated with infant survival rates. Makes a lot of common sense but very cool to see data - especially data from two different sites thousands of miles apart in Africa showing baboons living in surprisingly similar social structures.
After the plenary talk, it was morning tea and we got to put up our posters. Obviously mine is the best one because it has cute photos of Audrey and Baxter on it... (just kidding!) There were some very cool posters hung up yesterday. Ones about whales, chipmunks, chickens, and everything in between! The official "poster sessions" are Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, where we've been asked to be available to discuss our posters with people.
The actual day of talks is organized into "streams" or "disciplines" - sort of. Basically there were seven meeting rooms where talks ran concurrently, each with a different topic of focus. There was a Communication room, a Learning and Cognition room, etc. Each person giving a talk had 12 minutes to present research and 3 minutes for questions (at least that was the aim).
The night before, we chose a bunch of "must see" talks, and just filled in the rest of the time with other talks that were taking place before/after the same rooms. It ended up being that we just happened to be sitting in some pretty cool rooms! Although I'm not sure that it isn't just that ALL the talks are super interesting.
At lunch time, we had scheduled to meet Dr Kazuo Fujita from Kyoto University. He is one of the leading researchers in non-human visual illusions and has done extensive research with pigeons and chickens. We went to grab food with him and a bunch of his students who were at the conference as well (10 of us in total!). Turns out service in Cairns follows the easy, laid-back model..where we don't get our food before it's time to go back to the conference!!!
Actually, it was only an issue because we were in a bit of a rush and just didn't have the time to sit, relax, and enjoy the beautiful weather (and we were hungry of course). Tiffani had been scheduled to give her talk on a Diabetes Alert Dog project at 2:00pm but was told that day that she'd been bumped up to 1:45. So we ended up having 15 minutes less time for lunch.
It's Tuesday morning now and time to head off to the conference again. Hopefully the internet will be working tonight so I can actually have time to write about some of the cool stuff we've seen!
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