Dr. Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin

I am a research group leader jointly affiliated with the MPI-AB Ecology of Animal Societies Department and the University of Konstanz Biology Department.

My group studies the mechanisms and consequences of collective behavior in social animals. We seek to understand how individuals in groups coordinate with one another to make collective decisions and engage in collective action. Our research focuses on investigating how these processes shape and are shaped by the social relationships among group members, and the communication strategies they employ. 

To tackle these questions, we combine high-resolution tracking of entire social groups in the wild with boots-on-the-ground field biology, and develop analytical approaches to infer from these data how individuals make decisions and how these decisions give rise to the patterns of collective behavior we see in nature. 

Our approach to science is highly interdisciplinary, collaborative, and comparative. We study a range of different species, and work in close collaboration with many other researchers and several long-term field studies around the world.

For more information, please visit our lab website (www.cocomo.group).