Events at the MPIAB

A suite of thermoregulatory adaptations that address the challenges posed by high temperatures were key in human evolution. These include the ability to maintain high activity levels under heat, facilitated by a unique capacity of sweating. High death tolls during heat waves, however, indicate the limits of our modern human bodies. Human heat resilience is incompletely understood, as the relative ... [more]

Coordinated motion in animals often results in mesmerizing patterns and plays a key role in predator avoidance or disease transmission. To study collective movement, we can now use advanced image-based analysis software and algorithms and quantify behavior in greater detail than ever before. In my research, I use computer vision and machine learning algorithms to analyse phenomena at different ... [more]

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Animals’ responses to climate change are shaped by mechanistic links between climate, performance and fitness. Extreme temperatures and unpredictable resource availability mean that birds in arid zones live near the edge of physiological tolerance limits, making them ideal models for studying these links. I will present data on twelve-plus years of research on birds in the arid zones of Southern ... [more]

There are both costs and benefits to group living. Benefits include reduced predation risk, while costs involve increased competition among group members for resources. Some social groups manage these trade-offs through fission-fusion dynamics, where groups regularly split into subgroups (fission) and later merge back together (fusion). Understanding the factors that drive these events and the ... [more]

As swarms of insects emerge briefly at dusk and dawn, the lesser bulldog bat in Panama faces an unique challenge: balancing the energy costs of flight and foraging activity with the need to feed on an unpredictable resource. For most of the year, these bats spend less than an hour each evening gathering what they need. But when reproduction demands higher energy intake, females seem to adapt by ... [more]

The emerging field of movement ecology, facilitated by recent advances in biologging technology, provides a powerful framework for studying animal behavior and inferring ecological patterns. Yet, the characteristically short time-series data from biologgers limits our ability to understand how movement patterns are linked to long-term processes like climate and demographic change. Long-term field ... [more]

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Guinea baboons live in a multi-level society with units comprising one reproductively active “primary” male and a number of females and their young. Females show high leverage in mate choice and may freely transfer between different males. I will present a series of studies that examined female choices, using long-term data and the outcomes of field experiments from our CRP Simenti project in ... [more]

Human-wildlife interactions are fundamentally driven by both societal and ecological factors, and negative interactions (i.e., "conflicts") are often underpinned by environmental injustices. Integrating local community perspectives and histories with data on ecology and animal behavior can help us to understand how people and wildlife can successfully share landscapes in a world of increasing ... [more]

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Scientific research is a complex endeavour. At the same time, it is the task of scientists as part of the society to make central findings of research accessible to the general public. Current approaches tend towards a strong simplification and illustration of results. At the same time, however, it is important to communicate the prerequisites, genesis of knowledge and limitations of research to ... [more]

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Understanding the genetics of bird migration is a long-standing goal in evolutionary biology. Blackcaps Sylvia atricapilla are ideal for this work as different populations exhibit enormous difference in migratory behaviour and little else. We characterize (i) phenotype, population structure and demographic history the blackcap, and (ii) identify sequence variants and signaling pathways that are ... [more]