Alison Wills
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Alison has completed a BSc in Veterinary Science at The Royal Veterinary College. During this time she performed two locomotion projects in the Structure and Motion Laboratory. She is looking forwards to continuing her work in this field.
Biography
Alison graduated from the Royal Veterinary College with a BSc in Veterinary Sciences in 2009. She has since accepted a BBSRC funded PhD position with the Structure & Motion Laboratory examining the locomotion of free ranging sports dogs and other animals that form social groups.
Research
Alison is interested in understanding how packs interact and co-operate for mutual benefit. Examples of this are sports dogs which hunt as a group, e.g. fox hounds, beagles and Painted/African hunting dogs which are reported to need a minimum pack size of 6 to successfully catch their prey and prey animals like sheep which have a complex social hierarchy [1].
Sheep are similar to dogs as they exhibit flocking behaviour in the same way that dogs form packs. It has been repeatedly proven that sheep are much more intelligent than was previously believed. They can discriminate between sheep, humans and other animals and can also recall the faces of 50 other sheep for a period of over two years [2]. Sheep are also able to self-medicate, which means that on ingestion of a foodstuff that causes them discomfort (for example indigestion) sheep will then select the correct food from a variety offered to cure their complaint [3].
In her PhD she will be using modern technology to provide an alternative method of analysing the pack dynamics of dogs and the interaction of sheep within a flock. Previously this has mainly been done by human observation with the exception of radio collars being fitted to zebras [4]. Initially she will place GPS based localization collars onto sheep to record their movements and augment these with a novel low power chip from Toumaz to record physiological data such as stride frequency and heart rate to understand the energetic implications of the social network on animals.
The collars will also be able to provide information on the direction in which the sheep are facing, which is important as it has been shown that sheep do not interact with one another head on. Sheep have a blind spot behind them, and so sheep tend to orient themselves within a flock so that two sheep subtend an angle of 110% which is the angle between the optic axis [5].
[1] Courchamp, F. and Macdonald, D. W. 2001 Crucial importance of pack size in the African wild dog Lycaon pictus. Animal Conservation 4 169-174. [2] Kendrick, K. M et al. 2001. Sheep don’t forget a face. Nature 141, 165. [3] Villalba, J. J et al. 2006. Sheep self-medicate when challenged with illness inducing foods. Animal Behaviour 71 1131-1139. [4] Lowe, B. et al. 2009 Partnering with local communities to identify conservation priorities for endangered Grevy’s zebra. Biological Conservation 142 1548-1555. [5] Hinch, G. N. and Adams D. B. 1992 The Behaviour of Sheep. CAB International . Chapter 3.