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]

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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]

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]