Events at the MPIAB

Reciprocity has been a controversial topic in behavioral ecology for over 40 years. How often is cooperation between animals stabilized by conditional responses to each partner's helping (reciprocity)? How often are cooperative investments explained by product returns (pseudo-reciprocity)? I argue that, in many real-world cases, helping increases both reciprocal help and byproduct returns. When you live in a group and you help a "friend" survive, you might simultaneously increase their willingness to reciprocate help, their ability to reciprocate help (because they are alive), and many other byproduct benefits of their existence (e.g. they help you notice if there is a predator). These causal factors cannot be easily disentangled, and these cases cannot be clearly categorized using traditional labels in behavioral ecology, yet these scenarios may be common. I will review this controversial topic using recent work in food-sharing vampire bats and cooperatively breeding superb starlings. [more]

Natural history and science museums are more than just showcases for scientific facts - they are dynamic interfaces between research and society. They captivate a wide audience, often providing the first contact of children with science and research. They make complex scientific topics tangible and they promote a dialog over current research questions. But how are exciting exhibitions created and why do people visit museums in the first place? This talk provides an overview over the opportunities museums offer for science communication and how researchers can make their work accessible to a wider audience. [more]

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Multi-predator feeding aggregations (MPFAs) are temporary co-occurrences of predators simultaneously exploiting the same prey resource. The open ocean is home to the largest and most diverse MPFAs on the planet, however, our knowledge of the mechanisms and functions driving the existence of MPFAs is heavily biased towards terrestrial systems. Terrestrial MPFAs typically occur at carrion and are characterized by the fight for resource monopolisation. In contrast, in the open ocean, interactions between predators rarely involve aggression presumably because monopolisation of large fish schools or krill swarms is impossible. There has been considerable speculation regarding the interactions of predators in open ocean MPFAs which include sharks, Teleost fishes, seabirds, pinnipeds and cetaceans. Only recently have scientists begun to obtain data on attack and capture rates of predators at MPFAs which allow insights into whether their interactions are competitive, mutualistic or neutral. In this talk, I will provide an overview of within-species and between-species interactions of predators that hunt the same prey schools/swarms. [more]