Katja Rudolph

• Dr. rer. nat.
• Press Officer at Sartorius

Background Various aspects of sociality can benefit individuals’ health. The host social environment and its relative contributions to the host-microbiome relationship have emerged as key topics in microbial research. Yet, understanding the mechanisms that lead to structural variation in the social microbiome, the collective microbial metacommunity...

Glucocorticoids have wide-ranging effects on animals' behaviour, but many of these effects remain poorly understood because numerous confounding factors have often been neglected in previous studies. Here, we present data from a 2-year study of 7 groups of wild Verreaux's sifakas (Propithecus verreauxi), in which we examined concentrations of faeca...

Group size is a key component of sociality and can affect individual health and fitness. However, proximate links explaining this relationship remain poorly understood, partly because previous studies neglected potential confounding effects of ecological factors. Here, we correlated group size with various measures of health while controlling for m...

Inhibitory control, defined as the ability to prevent pre-potent and unproductive actions, serves as a measure of cognitive skills in humans and non-human primates. Comparative research in this field revealed feeding ecology and aspects of social complexity, i.e. group size and fission-fusion dynamics, as reliable predictors for self-control in pri...