Parus Major
Our group has some pretty strong research links with the biology department, in particular the ornithology group. No wait this will actually end up being a funny anecdote, stay with me. Anyway we've pursued various projects on trying to work out how pigeons navigate, tracking migratory birds across the globe and detecting patterns in the dives of penguins. Basically the biology guys take care of all the messy field work and then handball onto us neat little packets of data which we can hit up with our algorithms from the comfort of our extremely expensive office chairs. We are now starting up a new project on the genealogy of a large community of Parus Major, or to use its more common name, the Great Tit. One of the aims of the project is to use several generations' worth of tracking to see how various factors influence reproductive success. More particularly, the ornithologists are interested in whether the birds have become more or less bold or aggressive as a consequence of greater human interference in their habitat. As such they are working on a paper titled `Great Tits and Personality,' which I personally think is hilarious.