Past Courses

A call for CARE in animal behaviour: An holistic ethical research framework

Institute Seminar by Nora Slania & Gal Badihi

New location: Bücklestrasse
Date: Nov 11, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Nora Slania & Gal Badihi
Gal Badihi is currently an Alexander van Humboldt research fellow at the University of Göttingen, German Primate Center. Her work focuses on the evolution of the different social and communicative strategies, primarily in chimpanzees. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Conservation, along with a Masters and PhD in Psychology from the University of St Andrews. She combines field observations with statistical models and social network analysis to describe the breadth and evolution of social behaviour and communication across different groups of wild chimpanzees. Through this work Gal developed a keen interest in conducting and developing ethical research methods, which ensures equal consideration of the impact our research has on the animals, people, and environments with which we work. Alongside her fundamental research on the evolution of social behaviour, she regularly engages with issues surrounding animal conservation and welfare. She started the CARE framework collective in 2023 to promote meaningful and practical discussion surrounding ethical research. Nora Slania is PhD student at the Max Planck Institut of Animal Behaviour, with an interdisciplinary background in comparative psychology (MSc) and philosophy and linguistics (BA). For her PhD, Nora is studying learning strategies of wild chimpanzees. She investigates how social learning across behavioural contexts shapes skill acquisition and cultural repertoires and how exploratory, more independent learning, is influenced by individual characteristics and social environments. Her research is based on observational and experimental data that she collected over several years in Uganda. During the course of her studies, Nora developed a profound commitment to sustainability and global justice, and her work with wild chimpanzees, in particular field experiments, sparked and required extensive considerations on ethical research practices with wild animals. Following her field work, Nora joined the CARE framework collective, and she is now excited to see it grow.
Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: nslania@ab.mpg.de

Despite increasing awareness of animal welfare, there are vast discrepancies between legal protections and recommended practices for different species, in different countries, and at different institutions. While many guidelines exist, these often target specific research contexts or species ... [more]

Evolution of objectives can enable prosocial behaviour without social awareness

Collective Behavior Seminar by Bernd Meyer

Date: Nov 7, 2025
Time: 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Bernd Meyer
Bernd Meyer is a professor of data science and artificial intelligence at Monash University, Australia and the deputy director of its environmental informatics hub. His team works in computational ecology developing mathematical and computational models for the interaction of organisms with their environment, including the impact our changing environment has on their lives. Most of this work is centred on the collective behaviour of social insects, such as bees and ants, in the hope that a deeper understanding of their behaviour will allow us to better protect them and the important ecosystem services they provide. Insect societies are entirely self-organised, without any central leader or master plan. How such decentralised "super-organisms" plan and coordinate their actions is still a largely open research question. Prof. Meyer’s team uses and extends a wide range of mathematical and computational techniques, including evolutionary game theory, reinforcement learning, reaction-advection diffusion and stochastic event analysis to explain this. Some of this work has interesting implications for a branch of bio-mimetic engineering and algorithm design, often referred to as “swarm intelligence." His lab also works on AI-based methods and systems for monitoring animal activity as the basis for ecosystem monitoring and for automating lab experiments.
Location: University of Konstanz + online
Room: ZT1202
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: mdagher@ab.mpg.de

Division of labour is fundamental to the functioning of societies and socially living organisms. While it has been central to their study for decades, no complete picture has emerged yet. Some of the most fascinating questions arise in the context of self-organised societies, such as those of ... [more]

The way home: Arctic peregrine falcons and the evolution of long-distance migration

Rado Seminar by Xiangjiang Zhan

Date: Nov 7, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Xiangjiang Zhan
Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: aflack@ab.mpg.de

Arctic peregrine falcons undertake remarkable long-distance migrations each year, crossing thousands of kilometers to reach their wintering grounds. Yet, how these migration routes form, maintain, and evolve under climate change remains unclear. Here we present an integrative study combining ... [more]

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 ... [more]

Works and Laboratory Safety at the Department of Collective Behavior

Collective Behavior Seminar by Michael Mende

Date: Oct 31, 2025
Time: 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Michael Mende
Location: University of Konstanz + online
Room: ZT1202
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: mdagher@ab.mpg.de

Ensuring a safe and compliant working environment is fundamental to maintaining the integrity and well-being of all staff and research operations. This talk will provide an overview of essential safety principles and recent updates to the department’s risk assessment. The session will address key ... [more]

Genetics of migration in songbirds

Rado Seminar by Kristaps Sokolovskis

Date: Oct 31, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Kristaps Sokolovskis
Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: aflack@ab.mpg.de

As a biologist and a hobby birder, I'm most fascinated by the phenomenon of bird migration, especially the long-distance journeys of the smallest of songbirds. It is often assumed (but not known for sure) that small songbirds migrate alone, relying to a large degree on an innate set of instructions ... [more]

Sensory flexibility in the desert locust - from social cues to collective migrations

Institute Seminar by Einat Couzin-Fuchs

Date: Oct 28, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Einat Couzin-Fuchs
Einat Couzin-Fuchs is Group Leader in Neurobiology at the University of Konstanz and affiliated scientist in MPI-AB. She investigates how sensory processing and neural circuits shape social plasticity and swarm dynamics in locusts. Her research additionally addresses olfactory processing and active sensing in insects. Trained in neuroscience at Tel Aviv University (PhD) and motor control at Princeton University (postdoc), she now combines these perspectives to study the neural computations of decision-making in individuals and groups.
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

Locusts offer a powerful model for studying social plasticity and collective behavior. Adapted to extreme environmental fluctuations, they can rapidly transition between solitary, cryptic grasshoppers and swarm-forming gregarious ones. Despite their importance as a model system and the severe ... [more]

Engineering Coral Resilience: Functional Testing of Probiotic Bacterial Isolates in Aiptasia Under Thermal Stress

Doctoral defense by Melanie Dörr, supervised by Christian Voolstra

Date: Oct 27, 2025
Time: 09:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Melanie Dörr
Location: University of Konstanz
Room: M 630 + online

[more]

The emergence and maintenance of animal societies 

Rado Seminar by Adriana Maldonado-Chaparro

Date: Oct 24, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Adriana Maldonado-Chaparro
Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Contact: aflack@ab.mpg.de

Social relationships influence individual fitness, shape group structure and play a fundamental role in the organisation of animal societies in a wide range of animals, including humans. Social relationships emerge from interactions among individuals; however, the mechanisms that allow these ... [more]

Development and reproduction in Amboseli elephants: a life history approach

Institute Seminar by Phyllis Lee

Date: Oct 21, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Phyllis Lee
Reader, University of Cambridge (Biological Anthropology) until 2005, Professor of Psychology at the University of Stirling from 2005, Emeritus Professor from 2020. My early field research was on juvenile baboons in Tanzania, and my PhD was on vervet monkeys in Amboseli, Kenya (based with Professor Robert Hinde, Zoology, University of Cambridge). My post-doc was studying calf development in the Amboseli elephants from 1981-84, and I have continued to work with these elephants for the last 40+ years. My MSc and PhD students have worked with elephants in Sri Lanka, India, Gabon, Congo, Kenya and Tanzania. We have studied welfare among captive elephants, as well as the ecology and behaviour of a number of primate species, including great apes, in areas as diverse as the Central African Republic and Brazil.
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

I will be presenting information from a small population of elephants which ranged in size from ~600 (1970s) to ~1800 elephants (2025), and which ranges over ~5000 km² in Southern Kenya. Individuals (n >4600) and families (n = 64) have been followed since 1972; births, deaths and matings are ... [more]

Past Courses / Events