Save the date: On July 8, 2017 will be our next open day in Seewiesen with many guided tours, talks, presentations and a childrens' university - mostly in German but also in English. The Max-Planck Institute for Ornithology gladly welcomes all, to visit and explore the latest state of the art research.
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Vampire bats live on the edge. If they do not get enough to eat, it does not take long before they die of starvation. Other animals often step in, sharing blood meals. Damien Farine and colleagues now discovered that unrelated friends are an important backup support when family members go missing. Bats that previously built up a social network with non-relatives got fed more often after the loss of a closed relative.
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On April 27th, Prof. Dr. Franz Huber passed away at the age of 91. He was director of the department „Neuroethology“ at the former Max Planck Institute of Behavioural Physiology in Seewiesen from 1973 to 1993. Franz Huber was interested in the neural basis of behavior, mainly the acoustic communication of crickets, katydids and cicada. His research was important to establish the research field of behavioural neurobiology and with his work Franz Huber gained the recognition of the national and international scientific community.
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The symposium will take place from June 19-20 in Berlin, organized by director Manfred Gahr from Seewiesen with the MPI for Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg. By bringing together scientists from evolutionary perspective, behavioural plasticity, genetics, epigenetics and comparative genomics a vivid interdisciplinary platform will be created for discussions -among others- of how the environment may influence gene networks. More information in the flyer:
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Niels Rattenborg was the first to demonstrate sleep in flying birds (Published 2016 in the journal Nature Communications) and therefore won this years outstanding scientific achievment award of the Sleep Reseach Society. Using electroencephalogram recordings of great frigatebirds flying over the ocean for up to 10 days, his team found that the birds can sleep with either one hemisphere at a time or both hemispheres simultaneously. However, while in flight they sleep for a much smaller percentage of time than they do while on land.
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Lisa Gill, Nico Adreani and Pietro d’Amelio present microphone backpacks designed in Seewiesen. These lightweight wireless microphone backpacks facilitate undisturbed, individual vocal recordings within a group setting for about 2 weeks. This will open up many new opportunities for novel research questions.
After having journeyed half way across the globe, male pectoral sandpipers visit up to 24 potential breeding sites within their breeding range in the Arctic to increase their reproductive success, shows a study in the journal NATURE from Mihai Valcu and Bart Kempenaers. [more]
Researchers from Seewiesen investigated whether the timing of dawn singing in wild songbirds is influenced by artificial light. They illuminated eight previously dark forest edges with white, green, red or no light, and recorded daily onset of dawn singing during the breeding season. They predicted that onset of singing would be earlier in the lighted treatments but found no significant effect of the experimental night lighting (of any colour) in 14 species.
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Niels Rattenborg and colleagues have discovered that birds can sleep in flight, which has received large national and international attention. Now the study got awarded from the magazin discover as one of the Top 100 stories of 2016 - congratulation!
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In barred buttonquails (Turnix suscitator), females show male typical behaviours like courtship or territoral defense. A study from Cornelia Voigt of the Department of Neurobiology in Seewiesen now showed that hormone profiles were not sexually reversed. However, female-biased sex differences in androgen receptor gene expression in hypothalamic and limbic brain regions were found that were already in place at hatching. Such sex differences are unknown from non-sex-role reversed species and suggest that increased neural androgen sensitivity could be involved in the mechanisms mediating sex-role reversed behaviours.
Current levels of road traffic noise mask alarm calls, impeding the ability of great tits to perceive these critical signals. This is shown by a new study in Current Biology led by Henrik Brumm from Seewiesen. Only at a distance of 40 m, the researchers observed some relief from masking with their playback experiments and therefore urgently suggest measures to minimize anthropogenic noise to avoid negative fitness consequences for animals living close to roads.
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On January 1st, the research group of Clemens Küpper has officially started. He and his colleagues will study how natural variation in behaviour, i.e. different strategies of mating and parental care behaviour evolve and co-exist next to each other.
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Social play is a frequent behaviour in great apes, which involves sophisticated forms of gestural exchanges. However, relatively little is known about whether signals are adjusted to specific attributes of conspecifics. Marlen Fröhlich and Simone Pika of the Humboldt Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, in collaboration with Roman Wittig from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, carried out the first study on the exchange of play-soliciting gestures in two chimpanzee communities in their natural environments. The results of this study strengthen the view that our closest living relatives are able to adjust gestures flexibly according to social circumstances and individual matrices of their interaction partners.
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Martin Wikelski, director in Radolfzell and honorary professor at the University of Constance receives this year's Max Planck Research Award for his research into the sensory perception of organisms. Using the satellite-based monitoring system Icarus, he is a pioneer in the field of wild animal telemetry.
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The list of animal species you can follow with the Animal Tracker increased considerably. New species are:Turkey Vultures, Black Vultures, Himalayan Griffon Vultures, Magnificent Frigatebirds, Black Storks, Bald Eagles, Whooper Swans, and our first mammal species:Black Flying Foxes! Often requested, now implemented: search and filter features!
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Buteo-morph is a hand-on-project of our institute for all interested bird observers: Data is collected throughout whole Europe on the geographical and temporary differences in the distribution of the various morph-types in the common buzzard.
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