Events at the MPIAB

Institute Seminar by Kamran Safi

Institute Seminar by Kamran Safi
  • Date: Oct 27, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Kamran Safi
  • I am a declared fossil of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, where I lead the Animal-Environment Interactions group. My work began at the University of Zurich with bats, their social lives, brain evolution, and moved through the comparative evolution and macroecology of mammals at the Zoological Society of London to tracking animals in the air, on land and at sea: young golden eagles learning to soar on thermals, wind and gravity waves in the Alps, gulls that need their sense of smell to navigate, the fastest horizontal flight recorded in a vertebrate, and ravens that anticipate where wolves will kill. I also build tools for analyzing such tracks, including the R packages move and move2 and the MoveApps platform. I have worked and still do fieldwork in Europe, Africa and Latin America. As a common denominator: I investigate how animals navigate their environments and how these environments define how they have evolved and behave. Ultimately, I want to understand how the world feels to them and how that defines why they are the way they present themselves to us.
  • Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: lrosales@ab.mpg.de
The energy landscape (Wilson et al. 2012) describes how the cost of movement varies across an environment. It has no definition that separates the environment from the animal moving through it. Elham Nourani, Martina Scacco, Emily Shepard and I propose the movement niche as that definition: the cost of moving a unit of distance as a function of environmental conditions, set by body form and ... [more]

Wild cognition: is something fishy with traditional evolutionary theories of cognition?

Institute Seminar by Maëlan Tomasek, Winner of the MPI-AB/QBEE Excellence Paper Award 2026
  • Date: Nov 17, 2026
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Maëlan Tomasek
  • Location: online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
To explain interspecific differences in cognition, the fundamental aim of comparative psychology, the field has offered several hypotheses such as the famous Social Intelligence Hypothesis or Ecological Intelligence Hypothesis. However, these adaptive theories rely on premises that might be unfounded and experimental support for these hypotheses is often weakened by confounding factors such as ... [more]

Institute Seminar by Jenny Allen

Institute Seminar by Jenny Allen
  • Date: Feb 2, 2027
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jenny Allen
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: tkirchner@ab.mpg.de
[more]
Etho 2027

ETHO 2027

Annual Meeting of the Ethological Society – Konstanz, 24–27 February
  • Start: Feb 24, 2027 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • End: Feb 27, 2027 12:00 PM
  • Location: Konzil, Hafenstraße 2, 78462 Konstanz
  • Room: Oberer Konzilsaal
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: etho2027@ab.mpg.de
Join us for Etho 2027, the Annual Meeting of the Ethological Society, organized by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, 24-27 February, 2027. [more]
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