Institute Seminar by Kamran Safi

Date: Oct 27, 2026
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Kamran Safi
I am a declared fossil of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, where I lead the Animal-Environment Interactions group. My work began at the University of Zurich with bats, their social lives, brain evolution, and moved through the comparative evolution and macroecology of mammals at the Zoological Society of London to tracking animals in the air, on land and at sea: young golden eagles learning to soar on thermals, wind and gravity waves in the Alps, gulls that need their sense of smell to navigate, the fastest horizontal flight recorded in a vertebrate, and ravens that anticipate where wolves will kill. I also build tools for analyzing such tracks, including the R packages move and move2 and the MoveApps platform. I have worked and still do fieldwork in Europe, Africa and Latin America. As a common denominator: I investigate how animals navigate their environments and how these environments define how they have evolved and behave. Ultimately, I want to understand how the world feels to them and how that defines why they are the way they present themselves to us.
Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: lrosales@ab.mpg.de

The energy landscape (Wilson et al. 2012) describes how the cost of movement varies across an environment. It has no definition that separates the environment from the animal moving through it. Elham Nourani, Martina Scacco, Emily Shepard and I propose the movement niche as that definition: the cost of moving a unit of distance as a function of environmental conditions, set by body form and locomotor mode. It is structured like Hutchinson's ecological niche, with a fundamental niche set by the body and a realized niche set by behavior. And it is precisely this fundamental niche, which casts a potential energy landscape, and among which the realised niche represents an experienced one. The mean of the distribution of costs over the conditions an animal meets is its cost of transport. The niche ends where a passage costs more than the animal can pay, thereby allows also conceptually to better investigate the influence of extreme conditions on moving animals. This talk introduces the concept, shows how it can be estimated from tracking and accelerometer data, and invites comments on a framework presented here for the first time.

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