Past Events

Documenting animal experiments - legal requirements and MaxCare as a new tool

Rado Seminar by Inge Müller

Date: May 23, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Inge Müller
Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: ddechmann@ab.mpg.de

The seminar will cover the legal requirements for documenting animal experiments, both in a general context and with a specific focus on German and EU legislation. We will introduce MaxCare, a customized database designed to help you document animal experiments consistently and thoroughly, ensuring ... [more]

Neuroethology of African Cichlids: Environmental and Social Influences on Neuroanatomical Variation

Doctoral defense by Bin Ma, supervised by Alex Jordan

Date: May 23, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM - 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Bin Ma
Location: University of Konstanz
Room: A702 + online

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Knowledge and culture in savannah elephants: What do we know, and what should we do next?

Institute Seminar by Lucy Bates

Date: May 20, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Lucy Bates
My research considers the evolution of social skills and cognition in mammals, particularly elephants. My current work concerns the acquisition of information and the role of ‘knowledgeable’ individuals in elephant society. This has implications for elephant conservation and management policy, which is an important part of my interest, and I endeavour to use my research to contribute to and enable sustainable, fair and effective conservation practices. My passion for studying elephant cognition began with my first post-doctoral research position, conducted between 2005 and 2008 at the University of St Andrews. Working with Professor Dick Byrne, I conducted some of the first field studies exploring social cognition in savannah elephants, working in collaboration with the Amboseli Trust for Elephants. Before that I completed my PhD on chimpanzee behavioural ecology, also at St Andrews. After the post-doc I took a break from academia, working as a consultant for various conservation projects in southern Africa between 2009 and 2015 before returning to research with a part-time Daphne Jackson Trust Fellowship held at the University of Sussex, working alongside Professor Karen McComb. I then worked as an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, before joining the University of Portsmouth as a (part-time) lecturer in 2022.
Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: rthillaikumar@ab.mpg.de

In this talk, I will explore what we know about the acquisition of information and the role of knowledgeable individuals in elephant society. It is something of a mantra for elephant biologists that older elephants are ‘repositories of knowledge’, but I will question what this means in two ways ... [more]

Understanding Roost Fidelity in Cave-Dwelling Bats: Insights from PIT-Tag Monitoring of Rhinolophus euryale

Rado Seminar by Lander Olasagasti

Date: May 16, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Lander Olasagasti
Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: ddechmann@ab.mpg.de

Roosts are vital for bats, offering protection and a place to rest, breed, and socialise. Among roost types, caves are the most stable but also the least available, leading cave-dwelling bats to form larger colonies and switch roosts less often than tree-rosting species. Conservation and monitoring ... [more]

IMPRS PhD student retreat 2025

Start: May 14, 2025 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
End: May 16, 2025 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Dagmar Sigurdardottir
Location: Jugendherberge Burg Wildenstein
Host: IMPRS
Contact: imprs@uni-konstanz.de

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Fear Across Scales: The individual, collective, and community dynamics of antipredator behavior

Institute Seminar by Blair Costelloe

Date: May 13, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Blair Costelloe
Blair is a behavioral ecologist interested in the collective and anti predator behavior of African ungulates. She earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, before beginning a postdoc at the MPI-AB in 2016. During her postdoc she won a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship to lead the HerdHover project to develop drone-based methods for behavioral ecology studies .She is currently a Project Leader in the Department of Collective Behavior and a PI on the WildDrone project, an EU-funded Marie Curie Training Network that is developing autonomous drone technologies for nature conservation missions.
Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: cberthelot@ab.mpg.de

Animal behavior is a key determinant of individual fitness, but also drives patterns and processes at broader ecological scales. By studying the drivers and diversity of individual behavioral strategies, we can develop a mechanistic understanding of emergent collective behavior, population dynamics ... [more]

The role of epigenetic inheritance in rapid evolutionary adaptation of invasive plants

Doctoral defense by Jasmin Herden, supervised by Mark van Kleunen

Date: May 12, 2025
Time: 01:30 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Jasmin Herden
Location: University of Konstanz
Room: M 801 + online

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Unravelling the Past and Present: Marine Phytoplankton Population Dynamics in the face of the Anthropocene

Doctoral defense by Alexandra Schmidt, supervised by Laura Epp

Date: May 9, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM - 01:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Alexandra Schmidt
Location: University of Konstanz
Room: U307a + online

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Natural history museums: bridging research and society

Rado Seminar by Paquita Hoeck + Lukas Keller

Date: May 9, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Paquita Hoeck + Lukas Keller
Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: ddechmann@ab.mpg.de

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 ... [more]

Reciprocity in animals

Institute Seminar by Gerry Carter

Date: May 6, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Gerry Carter
I'm an Associate Professor at Princeton University, a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), and a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I was previously an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, a Humboldt Fellow at MPI-AB (then Ornithology) in Konstanz, and a Smithsonian Postdoc Fellow at STRI. I did my PhD with Jerry Wilkinson at the University of Maryland. Outside work, my hobbies are that my kids are 4 and 2 years old.
Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: ehurme@ab.mpg.de

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 ... [more]