Events at the MPIAB

In humans, having stronger, more numerous, or more supportive social relationships predicts mortality risk from almost every cause of death—a pattern that cuts across cultural, geographic, gender, and socioeconomic lines. Recent studies from a wide range of wild mammals show startling converge with the human literature: more socially connected individuals typically experience improved health and reduced mortality risk throughout adulthood. Yet clear explanations for such patterns in animals remain elusive, and empirical studies often find disparate aspects of social relationships to be most predictive of survival, even within single populations. I will discuss my work on understanding these links, focusing on adult survival in nonhuman primates, and drawing on data from long-term field research on wild baboons and capuchins. I will also discuss patterns of age-related variation in different aspects of affiliative social relationships throughout the natural aging process in primates. [more]

Little is known about the spatial use and migration behavior of European Honey Buzzards (Pernis apivorus) in Germany. Looking at tagging projects in Germany, covering this subject, only one could be found in which German Honey Buzzards were tagged in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany from 2001 to 2011 by Meyburg et al. (2013). The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior started a tagging project on this topic in 2019.In this work, the data is analyzed for the first time with a special focus on the wintering areas. The distribution of habitats, their size, the daily distance of the forays, land cover, temperature and precipitation will be analyzed and compared with the situation in the breeding areas.Between 2019 and 2023, the Max Planck Institute was able to tag eleven Honey Buzzards with GPS transmitters. The data were uploaded into Movebank, an open-source platform for processing animal-related data. The statistical calculations were done to these data. Using the Environmental Automated Track Annotation (Env-DATA) system, the data could be assigned to environmental data and land cover, temperature and precipitation wer analyzed.The results showed that wintering areas in West and Central Africa differ from the breeding areas in terms of their distribution, size, number and land cover. Similar to the site fidelity during the breeding season, it was observed that Honey Buzzards return to wintering sites from previous years.The results provide initial insights into the characteristics of wintering areas going beyond cartographic localization. Regarding the still small data set, the results only provide an initial insight into the behavior of German Honey Buzzards. [more]

A large body of theory of collective motion focuses large groups/populations. However, real animal groups live in small groups, which we call mesoscopic scales, where intrinsic stochastic fluctuations can not be ignored and have counter intuitive effects. In this talk, I will discuss both theory, empirical work and data-driven models all of which demonstrates the the novelty of collective motion at mesoscopic scales. [more]

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The topic of social learning initially had a slow start in animal behaviour, but now even exists as its own sub-field. My own niche within this new field is the study of ape social learning, and of ape cultures. Yet, regardless of study species, one of the main lessons from decades of study is that social learning is not monolithic. There are many types of social learning, each allowing for - but also sometimes curtailing - specific types of cultural effects. One of these effects is that of cultural evolution. For cultural evolution to happen, the underlying social learning type needs to be powerful enough to create replicator dynamics and, with it, inheritance pathways. Yet, few of the many social learning mechanisms described today create this necessary level of inheritance for a particularly important aspect of behaviour: for know-how-to-behave (what I call "know-how"). Therefore, there is a mismatch between finding general evidence for social learning of some type(s) (which will always suffice for general culture claims) and finding evidence for those social learning types that can make animals socially learn know-how. In certain additional circumstances, the latter type of learning can even allow for the cultural evolution of behavioural know-how beyond levels afforded by biological backgrounds. I call these latter cases "know-how copying". As I will show, know-how copying happens frequently in humans and also plays a large role. Yet, contrary to frequent claims in the literature, despite more than twenty years of dedicated research, my contrasting conclusion regarding ape cultures will be this. I fully agree that ape cultures exist, and also that apes can be socially triggered to develop similar know-how as others around them. Yet, my research supports the notion that apes completely or nearly completely lack cultural evolution of behavioural know-how, because the logical pre-requisite for such evolution - know-how copying - is weak, rare or perhaps non-existent in apes. Exceptions to this pattern are human-enculturated and/or human-trained apes. Such apes sometimes prove able to (weakly) copy know-how. Yet, I will additionally show why these humanised ape cases lack ecological relevance. [more]

In rural communities, Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) can pose a serious threat to household food security, safety, and livelihoods, and in turn, undermine conservation efforts. Managing HWC has become an increasingly important component of managing wildlife populations and protected areas. The Ikorongo – Grumeti Game Reserve complex in the western Serengeti is an inspirational conservation success story, but the recovery of wildlife populations has had the unintended consequence of escalating the severity and frequency of negative interactions between people and wildlife. In this talk I will discuss the various strategies we have implemented to mitigate and prevent HWC in the western Serengeti, with an emphasis on the applications, requirements, and limitations of electric fencing as a tool to prevent crop damage by elephants. [more]

My vision for conservation focuses on animal population size and connectivity. First, we need annual estimates of animal abundance and their trends to know which species most need our help, where. Second, we need species-specific measures of habitat connectivity between these populations to ensure animal movement continues to provide genetic exchange and allow colonization of new habitats as the planet warms. Both metrics need to account for the rapid changes from development and climate change, and the varied effects of human recreationalists and hunters. Just a few years ago, proposing these measures for all wildlife at global scales would have been absurd – but now it is possible. From camera traps, hunters, Native communities, naturalists, and animal tracking we have never had so much data about our wildlife. Satellites return live information about the landscapes and climates animals are moving through, and new analytical approaches (AI and others) allow us to combine these with animal data in population and movement models. Linking big data, live data, and real time analytics into an Internet of Animals will help us build a Digital Twin of planet earth that includes mobile animals and the ecosystem processes they support. [more]

Lions are iconic top predators that feature intensely in research and conservation projects. However, majority of such research has focused on lions in prey-rich savanna habitats. The typical model lion thus belongs to only a few charismatic populations, thereby confining our understanding of the behaviour of a widely distributed species. In this seminar, by summarizing my long-term behavioural research on Asiatic lions (a non-model population) and comparisons with East African savanna systems, I will delve into the ecological and evolutionary causes and consequences of sociality in lions. I will also briefly outline potential new collaboration/s with the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour at the University of Konstanz. I will end with an ECR perspective of working with a species that continues to awe us while also severely challenging our lives and livelihoods. [more]

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Dimensions of the social environment consistently emerge as some of the strongest predictors of fitness across a broad range of social mammals. This includes taxa spanning hundreds of millions of years of independent evolution and encompassing a highly diverse set of social relationship types. How can we understand the selective pressures that shape this diversity? Comparing social structures across species with different ecologies and kinship structures offers a promising route. However, the complexity of social behavioural data and variations in data collection methods pose significant challenges to such comparative analyses, mainly due to a lack of comparable social relationship data and the statistical methods to analyse them. In this talk, I will present MacaqueNet, a collaborative cross-species database of standardized macaque social behaviour data. I will discuss the challenges encountered in building and analysing this dataset and share insights gained from addressing them. Additionally, I will discuss my research combining comparative approaches and detailed longitudinal data to further our understanding of how kinship and environmental pressures shape social structure. [more]

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There is clear and growing evidence that anthropogenic impacts on our environment are impacting our quality of life. Spillovers of zoonotic diseases occur more frequently in degraded landscapes where contact between humans and wildlife increase. Restoration has been flagged as a key tool in our quest to redress some of the damage that has been done historically but there is very little known about how restoration may protect against spillover risk. In addition, how mechanisms that link to spillover risk may play out in restoring landscapes has rarely been tested and given that human interaction with restored landscapes is likely to remain high or increase because of the restoration, this may represent a risky environment for spillover. In this talk I will touch on some of the previous work carried out investigating transmission dynamics in a wild rodent at the individual and population level and discuss a little bit about how we intend to extend this work in RESTOREID using a range of novel technological approaches, with the belief that leveraging innovations in other disciplines can be an incredibly powerful tool for ecological research. [more]

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