Maria Camila Calderon

I am interested in understanding the behavior of social mammals, in particular of bats. After my undergraduate in Colombia, I did my Master’s at the University of Munich. At the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, I studied how colony size in the African straw colored fruit bat affects the bats’ foraging behavior.

For my PhD, I study group foraging in the Neotropical greater spear-nosed bat. In collaboration with Meg Crofoot, at the Ecology of Animals Societies Department, Dina Dechmann Group (Ephemeral Resource Adaptations) and Teague O'Mara, I aim to understand how changes in the distribution of resources in the landscape can influence group dynamics. To do so, I will map seasonal resource distribution and combine it with high-resolution movement and acoustic recordings of whole groups of bats. Further, I investigate how group foraging decisions can be facilitated by social information and the social interactions of the groups. I am very excited to start this field-based project and explore the causes of group foraging movements. Besides observing bats, I love dancing, doing acrobatics and flying on my aerial silk.