Biography

Biographical sketch

Turning my back on promising careers in dishwashing and courier driving, I decided to indulge my life-long interest in animals by enrolling in the Undergraduate Specialist Program in Animal Behaviour at the University of Toronto's Erindale Campus. Combining elements of Psychology and Biology, that program fueled my interest in animal behaviour, and culminated in Undergraduate Thesis work on ant brood recognition under the supervision of Professor Thomas M. Alloway.

I graduated with my B.Sc. in 1985, and opted to stay in Professor Alloway's lab at the University of Toronto to conduct M.Sc. research addressing the potential role of early learning in brood acceptance by hosts of slave-making ants. I successfully defended my Master's thesis in the fall of 1987, and with a new found appreciation for the general importance of social recognition mechanisms to the evolution and maintenance of sociality, decided to explore vertebrate social recognition in the lab of Professor Jan O. Murie at the University of Alberta.

My dissertation research explored proximate mechanisms underlying social discrimination in free-living Columbian ground squirrels, and ultimately led to my current interest in explanations for animal sociality that transcend benefits accruing via kin selection. I defended my Ph.D. dissertation in the fall of 1991, which was awarded the T.W.M. Cameron Award for the outstanding Doctoral thesis in Zoology in Canada. Realizing that social recognition in animals often relies on chemical cues, I accepted an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in January of 1992 to pursue work on the chemical ecology of recognition and antipredator behaviour in the lab of Professor Tom Eisner in the Section of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University.

I left Cornell in 1993, however, to take a faculty position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Zoology at Brandon University. There, I offered numerous undergraduate courses, and began my current research programs on Richardson's and Franklin's ground squirrels. In the fall of 1999, I moved to my current academic position at the University of Manitoba, where my research has expanded to address multiple aspects of sociality, communication and cognitive abilities of ground-dwelling squirrels. Despite that focus, I am broadly interested in social behaviour, antipredator behaviour, and communication, and have published papers on ants, ground squirrels, garter snakes, moths and fish.

Accompanying me in my quest to understand behaviour, and often reinforcing the lessons non-human animals offer, are my wife Liz, son Alex and daughter Colleen.

"Be excellent to each other"

Bill S. Preston Esq. & Ted "Theodore" Logan