Gabrielle Davidson

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University College Cork

Empirical studies from laboratory systems and humans show that the gut microbiota is linked to host health. Similar evidence for effects on traits linked to fitness in nature is rare, not least because experimentally manipulating the gut microbiota is challenging. We isolated, characterized, and cultured a bacterial strain, Lactobacillus kimchicus...

Social structure and individual sociality impact a wide variety of behavioural and ecological processes. Although it is well known that changes in the physical and social environment shape sociality, how perturbations govern sociality at a fine spatial scale remains poorly understood. By applying automated experimental treatments to RFID-tracked wi...

The gut microbiome has important consequences for fitness, yet the complex, interactive nature of ecological factors that influence the gut microbiome has scarcely been investigated in natural populations. We sampled the gut microbiota of wild great tits (Parus major) at different life stages and across multiple conifer and mixed woodland fragments...

Territorial animals often respond less aggressively to neighbours than strangers. This ‘dear enemy’ effect is hypothesized to be adaptive by reducing unnecessary aggressive interactions with non-threatening individuals. A key prediction of this hypothesis, that individual fitness will be affected by variation in the speed and the extent to which in...

Inhibitory control is one of several cognitive mechanisms required for self-regulation, decision making and attention towards tasks. Inhibitory control is expected to influence behavioural plasticity in animals, for example in the context of foraging, social interaction or responses to sudden changes in the environment. One widely used inhibitory c...

Feathers have a diversity of functions in birds and are costly to produce, so their growth rate and mass can be reliable indicators of nutritional condition at the time of production. Despite the potential for feather metrics to advance our understanding of foraging, they are underused in avian ecology. One reason for this is the difficulty of inte...

Organisms are constantly under selection to respond effectively to diverse, sometimes rapid, changes in their environment, but not all individuals are equally plastic in their behaviour. Although cognitive processes and personality are expected to influence individual behavioural plasticity, the effects reported are highly inconsistent, which we hy...

Although the evolution of cognitive differences among species has long been of interest in ecology, whether natural selection acts on cognitive processes within populations has only begun to receive similar attention. One of the key challenges is to understand how consistently cognitive traits within any one domain are expressed over time and acros...

Inhibitory control is one of several cognitive mechanisms required for self-regulation, decision making and attention towards tasks. Linked to a variety of maladaptive behaviours in humans, inhibitory control is expected to influence behavioural plasticity in animals in the context of foraging, social interaction, or responses to sudden changes in...

The producer–scrounger game is a key element of foraging ecology in many systems. Producing and scrounging typically covary negatively, but partitioning this covariance into contributions of individual plasticity and consistent between individual differences is key to understanding population‐level consequences of foraging strategies. Furthermore,...

Territorial animals often exhibit the dear enemy effect, in which individuals respond less aggressively to neighbours than to other individuals. The dear enemy effect is hypothesized to be adaptive by reducing unnecessary aggressive interactions with individuals that are not a threat to territory ownership. A key prediction of this hypothesis, that...

Adapting to environmental change is a major challenge faced by animals and the role of individual behavioural differences in facilitating this process is currently the focus of much research. Innovation, the generation of a novel behaviour or use of a known behaviour in a novel context, is one form of behaviour that enables animals to respond to ch...

Natal body mass is a key predictor of viability and fitness in many animals. While variation in body mass and therefore juvenile viability may be explained by genetic and environmental factors, emerging evidence points to the gut microbiota as an important factor influencing host health. The gut microbiota is known to change during development, but...

Organisms are consistently under selection to respond effectively to a diversity of, sometimes rapid, changes in their environment. Behavioural plasticity can allow individuals to do so instantaneously, but why individuals vary in this respect is poorly understood. Although personality and cognitive traits are often hypothesised to influence plasti...

The microbial community in the gut is influenced by environmental factors, especially diet, which can moderate host behaviour through the microbiome-gut-brain axis. However, the ecological relevance of microbiome-mediated behavioural plasticity in wild animals is unknown. We presented wild-caught great tits (Parus major) with a problem-solving task...

Natal body mass is a key predictor of viability and fitness in many animals. While variation in body mass and therefore viability of juveniles may be explained by genetic and environmental factors, emerging evidence points to the gut microbiota as an important factor influencing host health. The gut microbiota is known to change during development,...

Although the evolution of cognitive differences among species has long been of interest in ecology, whether natural selection acts on cognitive processes within populations has only begun to receive similar attention. One of the key challenges is to understand how consistently cognitive traits within any one domain are expressed over time and acros...

Recent research in laboratory animals has illuminated how the vertebrate gut microbiome can have diverse and powerful effects on the brain and behaviour. However, the ecological relevance of this microbiome–gut–brain (MGB) axis outside the laboratory remains unexplored. Here we argue that understanding behavioural and cognitive effects of the gut m...

Cognition arguably drives most behaviours in animals, but whether and why individuals in the wild vary consistently in their cognitive performance is scarcely known, especially under mixed-species scenarios. One reason for this is that quantifying the relative importance of individual, contextual, ecological and social factors remains a major chall...

Studies in lab rodents indicate diet alters host gut microbiome and that the gut microbiome influences behaviour. However, the ecological relevance across species and in wild animals is unclear. First we showed that problem solving performance in wild caught great tits (Parus major) was weakly associated with natural variation in the gut microbiome...

Research into proximate and ultimate mechanisms of individual cognitive variation in animal populations is a rapidly growing field that incorporates physiological, behavioural and evolutionary investigations. Recent studies in humans and laboratory animals have shown that the enteric microbial community plays a central role in brain function and de...

Urban ecosystems are not unique, as the ecological processes and anthropological effects they encapsulate can equally be found in a range of human dominated environments. Applying ecological lessons from both within and outside urban areas is important for insect conservation within our expanding towns and cities. The management of urban grasslands...

Urban ecosystems are not unique as the ecological processes and anthropological effects they encapsulate can equally be found in a range of human dominated environments. Applying ecological lessons from both within and outside urban areas is important for insect conservation within our expanding towns and cities. The management of urban grasslands,...

Personality research suggests that individual differences in risk aversion may be explained by links with life-history variation. However, few empirical studies examine whether repeatable differences in risk avoidance behaviour covary with life-history traits among individuals in natural populations, or how these links vary depending on the context...

Research into proximate and ultimate mechanisms of individual cognitive variation in animal populations is a rapidly growing field that incorporates physiological, behavioural and evolutionary investigations. Recent studies in humans and lab animals have shown that the enteric microbial community plays a central role in brain development and functi...

Scientific Reports 7 : Article number: 40062 10.1038/srep40062 ; published online: 05 January 2017 ; updated: 24 February 2017 This Article contains an error in the Methods section under the subheading ‘Subjects’: “Eurasian jays participated in the study (though see results for samples sizes for each test condition)”.

Knowledge about the causal relationship between objects has been studied extensively in human infants, and more recently in adult animals using differential looking time experiments. How knowledge about object support develops in non-human animals has yet to be explored. Here, we studied the ontogeny of support relations in Eurasian jays (Garrulus...

Strong selection pressures are known to act on animal coloration. Although many animals vary in eye colour, virtually no research has investigated the functional significance of these colour traits. Passeriformes have a range of iris colours, making them an ideal system to investigate how and why iris colour has evolved. Using phylogenetic comparat...

Knowledge about the causal relationship between objects has been studied extensively in human infants, and more recently in adult animals using differential looking time experiments. How knowledge about object support develops in non-human animals has yet to be explored. Here, we studied the ontogeny of support relations in Eurasian jays ($\textit{...

Attending to where others are looking is thought to be of great adaptive benefit for animals when avoiding predators and interacting with group members. Many animals have been reported to respond to the gaze of others, by co-orienting their gaze with group members (gaze following) and/or responding fearfully to the gaze of predators or competitors...

Predator recognition is a prerequisite for antipredator behaviour. Although species level predator recognition is well documented, there is emerging evidence that some birds, including corvids, can differentiate between individual humans that pose different levels of threat. Other predator cues such as gaze direction may offer additional important...

Animals often respond fearfully when encountering eyes or eye-like shapes. Although gaze aversion has been documented in mammals when avoiding group-member conflict, the importance of eye coloration during interactions between conspecifics has yet to be examined in non-primate species. Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) have near-white irides, which are co...

Sensitivity to the gaze of other individuals has long been a primary focus in sociocognitive research on humans and other animals. Information about where others are looking may often be of adaptive value in social interactions and predator avoidance, but studies across a range of taxa indicate there are substantial differences in the extent to whi...

Mutations in the gene HSPB1, encoding the small heat shock protein 27 (HSP27), are a cause of distal hereditary motor neuropathy (dHMN) and axonal Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT2). dHMN and CMT2 are differentiated by the presence of a sensory neuropathy in the latter although in the case of HSPB1 this division is artificial as CMT2 secondary to H...

Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) is a clinically and genetically heterogeneous group of diseases with approximately 45 different causative genes described. The aims of this study were to determine the frequency of different genes in a large cohort of patients with CMT and devise guidelines for genetic testing in practice. The genes known to cause...

The inherited neuropathies are a genetically and clinically heterogeneous group of disorders encompassing Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT), hereditary motor neuropathy (HMN) and hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy (HSAN). Mutations in over 45 genes have been implicated in causing the inherited neuropathies, and many more remain unknown. In...

The hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathies (HSAN, also known as the hereditary sensory neuropathies) are a clinically and genetically heterogeneous group of disorders, characterised by a progressive sensory neuropathy often complicated by ulcers and amputations, with variable motor and autonomic involvement. To date, mutations in twelve gene...

Background / Purpose: Hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathies (HSAN, also known as hereditary sensory neuropathies, HSN) are a clinically and genetically heterogeneous group of disorders.We selected a cohort of 149 patients diagnosed with hereditary sensory neuropathies and screened them for mutations in the coding regions of the known HSN...

The hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathies (HSAN) are rare inherited neuropathies presenting with sensory loss and complications, including ulcers, infections, osteomyelitis and amputations. Usually, sensory symptoms predominate although motor involvement can occur. Autonomic features may be minimal (then hereditary sensory neuropathy, HSN,...