About
33
Publications
20,782
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
535
Citations
Introduction
As a biologist specializing in behavioral ecology, my research is focused on understanding the collective phenomena and decision-making processes of social animals. Through collaborative efforts, my findings have contributed to the development of complex models of biological systems and inspired the design of intelligent artificial systems. In my current role as a scientific project manager, I now leverage my expertise to drive technological innovation that benefits the economy and society.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
May 2019 - April 2022
April 2018 - present
Position
- PhD Student
Description
- Mechanisms and functions of collective anti-predator responses
Education
October 2014 - March 2017
August 2012 - December 2012
March 2010 - October 2014
Publications
Publications (33)
Understanding the linkage between behavioral types and dispersal tendency has become a pressing issue in light of global change and biological invasions. Here, we explore whether dispersing individuals exhibit behavioral types that differ from those remaining in the source population. We investigated a feral population of guppies (Poecilia reticula...
Environmental changes due to non-native species introductions and translocations are a global concern. Whilst understanding the causes of bioinvasions is important, there is need for decision-support tools that facilitate effective communication of the potential risks of invasive non-native species to stakeholders. Decision-support tools have been...
Responding towards the actions of others is one of the most important behavioural traits whenever animals of the same species interact. Mutual influences among interacting individuals may modulate the social responsiveness seen and thus make it often difficult to study the level and individual variation in responsiveness. Here, open-loop biomimetic...
In many animal species, collective behaviours can be explained by a simple set of interaction rules. It is an intriguing question whether this generality at the level of mechanism also translates into generality at the level of function. Assuming that collective behaviour provides antipredator benefits for the partaking individuals, we ask whether...
As a result of the increasing threats posed by non-native species invasions, there has been a rise in the demand for decision support tools that can more efficiently identify those non-native species likely to become invasive. As part of the risk screening (first) step in the environmental risk analysis process, three multilingual decision support...
In invasion biology, terminological frameworks contribute to the improvement of effective communication among scientists, stakeholders, and policy-makers. This is important not only for informing policy decisions but also for engaging the broader public in understanding the risks associated with biological invasions. Meanwhile, the role of non-Engl...
The thermal ecology of ectotherm animals has gained considerable attention in the face of human-induced climate change. Particularly in aquatic species, the experimental assessment of critical thermal limits (CTmin and CTmax) may help to predict possible effects of global warming on habitat suitability and ultimately species survival. Here we prese...
Under the increasing threat to native ecosystems posed by non-native species invasions, there is an urgent need for decision support tools that can more effectively identify non-native species likely to become invasive. As part of the screening (first step) component in non-native species risk analysis, decision support tools have been developed fo...
The thermal ecology of ectotherm animals has gained considerable attention in the face of human induced climate change. Particularly in aquatic species the experimental assessment of critical thermal limits (CT min and CT max ) may help to predict possible effects of global warming on habitat suitability and ultimately species survival. Here we pre...
Collective behaviour is widely accepted to provide a variety of antipredator benefits. Acting collectively requires not only strong coordination among group members, but also the integration of among-individual phenotypic variation. Therefore, groups composed of more than one species offer a unique opportunity to look into the evolution of both mec...
Groups of animals can perform highly coordinated collective behaviours that confer benefits to the participating individuals by facilitating social information exchange and protection from predators¹. Some of these characteristics could arise when groups operate at critical points between two structurally and functionally different states, leading...
The ability of an individual to predict the outcome of the actions of others and to change their own behavior adaptively is called anticipation. There are many examples from mammalian species—including humans—that show anticipatory abilities in a social context, however, it is not clear to what extent fishes can anticipate the actions of their inte...
Social learning can facilitate information spread within groups and is generally assumed to increase learning efficiency in animals. Here, we asked how individual learning is affected by skill level of a demonstrator present during learning. We predicted that both task-naive and task-experienced individuals benefit from a task-experienced, conspeci...
Electronic decision-support tools are becoming an essential component of government strategies to tackle non-native species invasions. This study describes the development and application of a multilingual electronic decision-support tool for screening terrestrial animals under current and future climate conditions: the Terrestrial Animal Species I...
Feral populations of tropical fish species in temperate climates like Central Europe are a rare but repeatedly observed phenomenon. Due to the influence of industrial or geothermal heated water, released tropical fish may be able to survive harsh winter conditions. Here we characterize a newly discovered thermally polluted river, with an establishe...
The collective behavior of animals has attracted considerable attention in recent years, with many studies exploring how local interactions between individuals can give rise to global group properties.1, 2, 3 The functional aspects of collective behavior are less well studied, especially in the field,⁴ and relatively few studies have investigated t...
Bird predation poses a strong selection pressure on fish. Since birds must enter the water to catch fish, a combination of visual and mechano-acoustic cues (multimodal) characterize an immediate attack, while single cues (unimodal) may represent less dangerous disturbances. We investigated whether fish could use this information to distinguish betw...
Animals often face changing environments, and behavioral flexibility allows them to rapidly and adaptively respond to abiotic factors that vary more or less regularly. However, abiotic factors that affect prey species do not necessarily affect their predators. Still, the prey’s response might affect the predator indirectly, yet evidence from the wi...
Environmental changes due to non-native species introductions and translocations are a global concern. Whilst understanding the causes of bioinvasions is important, there is need for decision-support tools that facilitate effective communication of the potential risks of invasive non-native species to stakeholders. Decision-support tools have been...
Body size is often assumed to determine how successfully an individual can lead others with larger individuals being better leaders than smaller ones. But even if larger individuals are more readily followed, body size often correlates with specific behavioral patterns and it is thus unclear whether larger individuals are more often followed than s...
Animals often show high consistency in their social organisation despite facing changing environmental conditions. Especially in shoaling fish, fission–fusion dynamics that describe for which periods individuals are solitary or social have been found to remain unaltered even when density changed. This compensatory ability is assumed to be an adapta...
Understanding the linkage between behavioral types and dispersal tendency has become a pressing issue in light of global change and biological invasions. Here, we explore whether dispersing individuals exhibit behavioral types that differ from those remaining in the source population. We investigated a feral population of guppies ( Poecilia reticul...
We compared the social dynamics of two populations of the live-bearing Atlantic molly (Poecilia mexicana) that live in adjacent habitats with very different predator regimes: cave mollies that inhabit a low-predation environment inside a sulfidic cave with a low density of predatory water bugs (Belostoma sp.), and mollies that live directly outside...
Body size is often assumed to determine how successful an individual can lead others with larger individuals being more likely to lead than smaller ones. However, direct evidence for such a relation is scarce. Furthermore, even if larger individuals are more likely to lead, body size correlates often with specific behavioral patterns (e.g., swimmin...
Responding towards the actions of others is one of the most important behavioral traits whenever animals of the same species interact. Mutual influences among interacting individuals may modulate the social responsiveness 19 seen and thus makes it often difficult to study the level and variation of individuality in responsiveness. Here, biomimetic...
Biomimetic robots (BRs) are becoming more common in behavioral research and, if they are accepted as conspecifics, allow for new forms of experimental manipulations of social interactions. Nevertheless, it is often not clear which cues emanating from a BR are actually used as communicative signals and how species or populations with different senso...
Biological invasions continue to grow at a rapid rate, fuelling the need for effective and feasible biomonitoring approaches. Citizen science is an increasingly popular way of undertaking long-term and/ or large-scale monitoring while simultaneously engaging people with science and scientific issues. In temperate regions, industrially created therm...
Invasive alien species (IAS) are a significant and growing problem worldwide. In Europe, some aspects of IAS have been addressed through existing legal instruments, but these are far from sufficient to tackle the problem in a comprehensive manner. The Top 20 IAS issues for Europe were determined at the 1st Freshwater Invasives - Networking for Stra...
Thermally influenced freshwater systems provide suitable conditions for non-native species of tropical and subtropical origin to survive and form proliferating populations beyond their native ranges. In Germany, non-native convict cichlids (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) and tilapia (Oreochromis sp.) have established populations in the Gillbach, a smal...
