Bats in Translation
Institute Seminar by Mirjam Knörnschild
- Date: Nov 4, 2025
- Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Mirjam Knörnschild
- Mirjam Knörnschild is Professor of Evolutionary Ethology at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Head of the Department of Evolutionary Diversity Dynamics at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin. She is also a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Her lab studies acoustic communication, cognition, learning, and social behaviour of mammals. Mirjam is particularly interested in the vocal and cognitive capacities of bats. To study them, she combines field observations with bioacoustics, genetics and neuroethology.
- Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
- Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
- Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
- Contact: ddechmann@ab.mpg.de
Bats offer a powerful system to test how vocalizations shape behavior and diversification. Across species, vocal complexity tracks social complexity, and information-rich calls appear favored where group sizes and recognition demands are high. I will synthesize evidence for individual recognition and vocal production learning and highlight how social feedback modulates learning trajectories during ontogeny. I will then show how culturally transmitted dialects influence dispersal and mate choice, making culture a plausible driver of population structure and incipient speciation. Together, these results position bats as a key mammalian model for evaluating culture as an evolutionary force.
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.