Intended Audience
The Neuroscience Program welcomes St. Mary's College of Maryland's own Assistant Professor of Neurobiology Dr. Daniel Tobiansky who will present the fourth and final lecture in the 2021-2022 Neuroscience Seminar Series. He will speak on "How do woodpeckers hammer a tree without a helmet?: Neural control of drumming and harm reduction in a potentially costly territorial signal."
"Woodpeckers (Family: Picidae) have one of the most unique and potentially costly territorial signals. During the breeding season, woodpeckers will repeatedly hammer their heads against a solid, resonant substrate to signal their territory, which is called drumming. They drum at ~20x/sec up to 100 times a day with deceleration forces that would render most animals unconscious. My first goal is to explore what neural pathways control drumming and to see how these pathways compare to other acoustic, non-damaging territorial signals (e.g., singing in songbirds). My second goal is to understand what physiological mechanisms woodpeckers use to mitigate the extreme deceleration forces to avoid or mitigate brain trauma. In this talk, I will present my preliminary analyses which provide a starting point to a better understanding of both gaps in knowledge."
Dr. Tobiansky earned his B.S. in psychology and biology at DePaul University in Chicago and his Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada for four years and then a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University for two years before joining St. Mary's College.
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