Events at the MPIAB

Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

Social mitigation of infection risk in animal societies

Institute Seminar by Matthew Silk
  • Date: Apr 9, 2024
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Matthew Silk
  • I did my PhD and 2 post-doc contracts at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation and Environment and Sustainability Institute in Cornwall, UK. My PhD used social network methods to understand the social structure of a migratory geese. My post-docs then applied these skills at the interface of social behaviour, infectious disease and population ecology. I continued these research themes through a short post-doc with Nina Fefferman and at the University of Tennessee and a MSCA fellowship at CEFE in Montpellier. I have now just started as a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, with my research focused on the role of social networks in longer-term infectious disease dynamics.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: gabriella.gall@ab.mpg.de
Infectious disease risk can represent a key cost of social interactions. Therefore, quantifying how individuals mitigate this risk, while maximising social benefits can help us understand how individual social behaviour evolves and scales up to group and population-level social structure and dynamics. I will talk about how individual’s can balance this potential trade-off by being choosy or flexible with their social interactions, as well as the consequences of this for emergent social structure and spreading dynamics – considering both dyadic and higher-order interactions as I do. [more]

Hierarchical statistical models in wildlife ecology

Institute Seminar by Rahel Sollmann
  • Date: Apr 16, 2024
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Rahel Sollmann
  • I studied biology at the University of Cologne and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University Bonn, where I obtained my Diploma in 2006. I obtained my PhD from the Free University Berlin and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in 2011, with a dissertation on the ecology and conservation of jaguars in the central Brazilian Cerrado savannah. I spent the next 10 years in the USA, first as a post-doc in Dr. Beth Gardner’s lab at North Carolina State University (2011-2015), developing and applying hierarchical statistical models to questions of wildlife ecology and management. This was followed by a 1-year postdoc with the US Forest Service in Davis, CA, using HSMs to study the impact of fire and fire management on wildlife. In 2016, I was hired as an Assistant Professor for Quantitative Ecology at the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology at UC Davis. I stayed at UC Davis for five years, teaching introductory statistics and principles of sampling wildlife to undergraduates, and working with graduate students on applying HSM to different questions of wildlife ecology and conservation. In 2021 I moved to Berlin for my current position as Senior Scientist in the Department of Ecological Dynamics at the IZW, where I have been continuing my work on HSM in wildlife research.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: cmonteza@ab.mpg.de
Knowing how many species or individuals occur at a given place and time is fundamental to many questions in wildlife ecology, conservation and management. Enumerating wildlife, however, is complicated by our imperfect and varying (with method, species, habitat, etc) ability to detect animals. In this seminar, I introduce hierarchical statistical models (HSM) as a tool to deal with imperfect detection. I present two case studies using HSM of different levels of occurrence is estimated from species detection/non-detection data. We use this framework to evaluate how land use and climate change driven conversion to savannah habitat will likely affect terrestrial mammals in the Southern Brazilian Amazon. The second study uses open population spatial capture-recapture (opSCR), a much more complex framework that uses spatially explicit individual-level data collected over multiple surveys to estimate population density and demographic rates. We use opSCR to investigate the sex and age-specific expansion of the Pyrenean brown bear population. These case studies highlight the flexibility of HSM as a tool to account for different sampling scenarios and address a wide range of ecological questions. [more]

Which types of social relationships matter? Affiliative bonds and mortality risk in wild primates.

Institute Seminar by Fernando Campos
  • Date: Apr 23, 2024
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Fernando Campos
  • My research aims to understand how social and ecological experiences that accumulate across the life course are linked to individual differences in behavior, health, survival, and fertility. I use noninvasive field, lab, and computational methods to investigate these topics through the long-term study of wild nonhuman primates. I have worked with a variety of different wild primate populations, and I codirect the Santa Rosa Capuchin Project, a long-term research program focusing on white-faced capuchin monkeys in northwestern Costa Rica. I have a B.S in Biology from Caltech, M.A. and PhD degrees in Anthropology from the University of Calgary, and I did a postdoc at Duke University. I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of San Antonio, Texas.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: ukalbitzer@ab.mpg.de
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]

Institute Seminar by Vishwesha Guttal

Institute Seminar by Vishwesha Guttal

Institute Seminar by Jerry Moxley

Institute Seminar by Jerry Moxley

Conflict, collars, and fences: Managing landscapes for the benefit of people and wildlife in the Serengeti, Tanzania

Institute Seminar by Kristen Snyder
  • Date: May 21, 2024
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Kristen Snyder
  • I completed my PhD at the University of California – Davis, where my work focused on human-wildlife conflict and conservation planning. I joined the Grumeti Fund in 2015 while completing my degree and have subsequently worked with the organization in varying capacities as a postdoctoral fellow, Head Scientist, and Scientific Advisor (current). In 2019 I led the development and launch of our applied research program and facility, Research and Innovation for the Serengeti Ecosystem (RISE, see 'further information'). I am an affiliated scientist with the Wittemyer Lab at Colorado State University and Chief Scientist at Natural Capital. Human-wildlife conflict, coexistence, and linking science with conservation management are common themes in my work, which I approach from an interdisciplinary perspective and using a variety of tools, including household surveys, camera traps, wildlife GPS collars, and remote sensing.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: ktiedeman@ab.mpg.de
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]

Using the Internet of Animals to Monitor Local and Global Biodiversity

Institute Seminar by Roland Kays
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]

EAT, PREY, LOVE: The Role of Food & Mates in Shaping Lion Societies

Institute Seminar by Stotra Chakrabarti
  • Date: Jun 4, 2024
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Stotra Chakrabarti
  • Dr. Stotra Chakrabarti is an Assistant Professor of Animal Behaviour at Macalester College, Minnesota, USA. He has a MS in Wildlife Sciences and a PhD in Animal Behaviour from the Wildlife Institute of India, and he did his Postdoctoral Research from the University of Minnesota. He is a behavioural ecologist & conservation biologist, who’s expertise is in studying the links between fundamental animal ecology and applied conservation, with large mammals (especially carnivores) as study species. Stotra’s curiosity in the natural world began with a childhood spent watching leopards and elephants in the vicinity of where he grew up: the foothills of Himalayas in India. Subsequently, a very immersive and rigorous graduate program at the Wildlife Institute of India cemented his interest in animal behaviour and conservation biology.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: nborrego@ab.mpg.de
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]

Institute Seminar by Tiago Monteiro

Institute Seminar by Tiago Monteiro

Institute Seminar by Delphine de Moor

Institute Seminar by Delphine de Moor

Institute Seminar by Eliezer Gurarie

Institute Seminar by Eliezer Gurarie

Institute Seminar by Ana Sequeira

Institute Seminar by Ana Sequeira

Restoring biodiversity – the key to preventing the next pandemic?

Institute Seminar by Lucinda Kirkpatrick
  • Date: Jul 9, 2024
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Lucinda Kirkpatrick
  • I carried out my PhD at the University of Stirling investigating biodiversity differences and animal behaviour in response to management decisions in commercial coniferous plantations in the UK. While this focussed primarily on bat species, for my post doc and fellowship (FWO), I changed country, study species and study location to investigate how individual and population level drivers influence disease transmission in the multimammate mouse in Tanzania based at the EVECO group at the University of Antwerp, under Prof. Herwig Leirs. I have now joined Bangor University in North Wales as Lecturer in Wildlife Ecology, alongside co-leading a large consortium of partners to investigate how restoration influences biodiversity recovery, individual behaviour and mechanisms of spillover risk. This project, funded by Horizon EU, has just started and will run for four years and is a bringing together of the landscape scale drivers of biodiversity I investigated with my PhD and the drivers and mechanisms of spillover risk which underpinned my post doctoral and fellowship work. In addition, in order to investigate some of these key mechanisms of spillover risk, I collaborated with colleagues in Engineering in UAntwerp to develop miniaturised proximity loggers, which we launched into a spin off company, IoSA BV, focussed on low power solutions to investigating key components of animal behaviour.
  • Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: twild@ab.mpg.de
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]

Institute Seminar by Sara Beery

Institute Seminar by Sara Beery
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