It is a great pleasure to say that Sam Auty has been awarded a Certificate of Commendation by the Zoological Society of London as part of the Charles Darwin Award & Marsh Prize for the best undergraduate thesis across the UK. Well done Sam! A wonderful achievement. And thanks to Emily and the rest of the lab for providing such a supportive environment for him.

In other new paper news, Liam and Dave’s comments on the commentaries on our meta-analysis on mate choice experimental paradigms has been accepted in Behavioral Ecology. Hopefully the target review and commentaries will be out in print shortly – they are currently available online-early here. Ginny, Liam and Dave are also publishing a Quick Guide to Mating Failure in Current Biology. We will let you know when that is out too.

Well done to Becky. Her epic, six-experiment study of the costs and benefits of multiple mating in Nasonia vitripennis – a “mostly monadrous” wasp – has been accepted in Evolution. We will let you know when the print version appears. Nice one.

This week’s Paper of the Week is Heyes & Pearce (2015) Not-so-social learning strategies. Proc Roy Soc B 282: 20141709.

In this paper, Heyes and Pearce review social learning strategies (SLSs) in terms of their possible mechanistic underpinnings, in particular whether or not domain-general processes (i.e. aspects of associative learning at work in asocial learning) can explain SLSs, without the need for more complex, domain-specific mechanisms. A thought-provoking read. The call for greater mechanistic rigour is timely, especially if we are beginning to make untested assumptions about the complexity of underlying behavioural mechanisms.

Ginny, Liam and Dave’s Quick Guide to Mating Failure has just been accepted for publication in Current Biology. We will let you know when the print version is out. Now for the big review of mating failure…

This week’s Cute Picture of the Week is of a baby turtle, just as it hatched. Cue the theme from Jurassic Park…