Beatrice "Bea" Mao Telephone:   301-405-0374 (batlab) Email: bmao1@umd.edu Auditory Neurethology Laboratory University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742

 

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in the fields of bioacoustics, animal behavior, and social communication. In my graduate work I plan to study the functions of bat social calls, because while the diversity of bat social calls has been documented in many species, their functional roles remain to be determined.

Investigating the functions of social calls is necessary in order to understand the proximate and ultimate mechanisms underlying the evolution of social call use and repertoire in social animals. Because social calls may be costly to produce, e.g. energetic cost or increased conspicuousness to predators, the fitness benefits they confer can elucidate the ecological pressures that have shaped their uses and designs, as well as illustrate how social calls enhance information transfer between conspecifics.

Education

Graduate Student 2008-present	University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA	BEES program Co-advised by Cynthia Moss and Gerald Wilkinson
BA 2004-2008	Cornell University Ithaca, NY	Biology - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology