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.
The MPI-AB Seminar Series is open to members of MPI and Uni Konstanz. The zoom link is published each week in the MPI-AB newsletter.