Matthias-Claudio Loretto

Technische Universität München | TUM · Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Research Group

As human activities increasingly shape land- and seascapes, understanding human-wildlife interactions is imperative for preserving biodiversity. Habitats are impacted not only by static modifications, such as roads, buildings and other infrastructure, but also by the dynamic movement of people and their vehicles occurring over shorter time scales....

Anthropogenic food subsidies can alter ecosystem processes, such as competition, predation, or nutrient transfer, and may strongly affect protected areas. Increasing recreation and ecotourism often create food subsidies, especially in the surrounding lands through fast-growing gateway communities. How the effects of these subsidies extend into prot...

COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020 reduced human mobility, providing an opportunity to disentangle its effects on animals from those of landscape modifications. Using GPS data, we compared movements and road avoidance of 2300 terrestrial mammals (43 species) during the lockdowns to the same period in 2019. Individual responses were variable with no c...

Comparing oneself to others is a key process in humans that allows individuals to gauge their performances and abilities and thus develop and calibrate their self-image. Little is known about its evolutionary foundations. A key feature of social comparison is the sensitivity to other individuals’ performance. Recent studies on primates produced equ...

Comparing oneself to others is a key process in humans that allows individuals to gauge their performances and abilities and thus develop and calibrate their self-image. Very little is known about its evolutionary foundations. A key feature of social comparison is the sensitivity to other individuals’ performance. Recent studies on primates produce...

Sex differences in vertebrate spatial abilities are typically interpreted under the adaptive specialization hypothesis, which posits that male reproductive success is linked to larger home ranges and better navigational skills. The androgen spillover hypothesis counters that enhanced male spatial performance may be a byproduct of higher androgen le...

Background Anthropogenic food sources (AFSs) are widespread in human-transformed landscapes and the current scale at which they occur drives ecological change at the individual, population, and community levels. AFSs are exploited extensively by common ravens, Corvus corax . Understanding how raven populations use AFSs can provide insight into thei...

Understanding space use of endangered species is critical for conservation planning and management. The advances in technology and data analysis allow us to collect data with unprecedented quality and inform us about the movements and habitat use of individuals and groups. With only about 700 individuals left in the wild, the Northern Bald Ibis Ger...

Sex differences in vertebrate spatial abilities are typically interpreted under the adaptive specialization hypothesis, which posits that male reproductive success is linked to larger home ranges and better navigational skills. The androgen spillover hypothesis counters that enhanced male spatial performance may be a byproduct of higher androgen le...

The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent...

The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent...

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundr...

The storage of food is widespread among mammals and birds and can be flexibly adjusted to various contexts such as competition, food availability or energetic demands. In bird species, nonbreeders often move through large areas whereby periods of long-term settlement can alternate with short-term visits. In food-caching species these differences in...

Reduced human mobility during the pandemic will reveal critical aspects of our impact on animals, providing important guidance on how best to share space on this crowded planet.

The trade-off between speed and accuracy affects many behavioural processes like predator avoidance, foraging and nest-site selection, but little is known about this trade-off relative to territorial behaviour. Some poison frogs are highly territorial and fiercely repel calling male intruders. However, attacks need to be conducted cautiously, as th...

Many animal species cooperate with conspecifics in various social contexts. While ultimate causes of cooperation are being studied extensively, its proximate causes, particularly endocrine mechanisms, have received comparatively little attention. Here, we present a study investigating the link between the hormone cortisol, cooperation and social bo...

Social learning is a powerful mechanism of information acquisition and can be found in various species. According to the type of information transmitted, animals may change their motivation to perform actions, shift their perception/attention to relevant stimuli, associate other individuals' behaviours with particular stimuli/events or learn to per...

Background During the past decades, avian studies have profited from the development of miniature electronic devices that allow long-term and long-range monitoring. To ensure data quality and to inform understanding of possible impacts, it is necessary to test the effects of tagging. We investigated the influence of GPS-transmitters on the behaviou...

Numerous birds and mammals use vocal signals to advertise feeding opportunities but often such signals vary with individual and contextual factors. Non-breeding ravens call at food that is difficult to access, resulting in the attraction of nearby conspecifics. Although callers may benefit from group formation in various ways, we recently found sub...

Social foraging provides several benefits for individuals but also bears the potential costs of higher competition. In some species, such competition arises through kleptoparasitism, that is when an animal takes food which was caught or collected by a member of its social group. Except in the context of caching, few studies have investigated how in...

Within heterogeneous arable habitats close to urbanized Vienna, Austria, Eurasian Skylarks Alauda arvensis occurred at slightly lower densities than in other mixed farmland areas and at a much lower density than would be found in natural habitats. Territory density was negatively correlated with the occurrence of roads, tracks and high-intensity ag...

Parents can influence offspring dispersal through breeding site selection, competition, or by directly moving their offspring during parental care. Many animals move their young, but the potential role of this behavior in dispersal has rarely been investigated. Neotropical poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) are well known for shuttling their tadpoles fro...

In the last decades, the assumption that complex social life is cognitively challenging, and thus can drive mental evolution, has received much support from empirical studies in nonhuman primates. While extending the scope to other mammals and birds, different views have been adopted on what constitutes social complexity and which specific cognitiv...

Some protected species have benefited from human activities to a point where they sometimes raise concerns. However, gaps in knowledge about their human-related behaviour hamper effective management decisions. We studied non-breeding common ravens Corvus corax that aggregated and predated livestock in the surroundings of a landfill. Combining sever...

The reproductive season is energetically costly as revealed by elevated glucocorticoid concentrations, constrained immune functions and an increased risk of infections. Social allies and affiliative interactions may buffer physiological stress responses and thereby alleviate associated effects. In the present study, we investigated the seasonal dif...

List of all focal individuals. Name, sex (m = male, f = female), year of hatching, age class, pair bond status as well as involvement in the assay comparison are indicated. (DOCX)

Initiated and received affiliative behaviour for single individuals in the reproductive and post-reproductive season. (CSV)

Corticosterone metabolite (CM) concentrations for single individuals in the reproductive and post-reproductive season. (CSV)

Excretion patterns of endoparasite products (coccidian oocysts and nematode eggs) for single individuals in the reproductive and post-reproductive season. (CSV)

These authors contributed equally to this work Summary statement Three-striped poison frogs (Ameerega trivittata) can navigate home via a direct path from areas exceeding the range of their routine movements. Abstract Most animals move in dense habitats where distant landmarks are limited, but how they find their way around remains poorly understoo...

Animals relying on uncertain, ephemeral and patchy resources have to regularly update their information about profitable sites. For many tropical amphibians, widespread, scattered breeding pools constitute such fluctuating resources. Among tropical amphibians, poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) exhibit some of the most complex spatial and parental behavi...

Movement speed during tadpole transport Histogram showing the range of movement speed during tadpole transport from one tracking location to the next one (m/h).

Tagged male tadpole carrier The tag consists of a silicon tube around the waist, with an additional silicone strap between the hind legs, a small diode (beneath the white sealing) and a dipole antenna made of flexible coated wire.

Movement precision during tadpole transport Summarized data of the average angular deviation, average distance from the straight-line path and SC for the tadpole transport of frogs which encountered only available pools during tadpole transport (A) and frogs which encountered non-available pools (N), minimum, maximum, 1st and 3rd quartile, median a...

Movement precision during homing Summarized data of the average angular deviation, average distance from the straight-line path and SC for the homing trajectories of frogs which encountered only available pools during tadpole transport (A) and frogs which encountered non-available pools (N), minimum, maximum, 1st and 3rd quartile, median and mean.

Homing trajectories Trajectory map showing movement patterns of frogs homing back to their territory after tadpole transport. Red asterisks represent the territory centers of tracked carriers and colored lines show different tracking events. Squares represent the cross-array of thirteen artificial tadpole deposition sites, blue squares representing...

Summarized results of homing trajectories Each row represents a specific tracking event. Columns show the tracked distance during homing, straight line distance (from the last deposition site to the territory center), duration of homing, whether homing took more than one day (overnight = 1), average speed and the straightness coefficient.

Raw data Spatial coordinates of tracked frogs.

Movement speed during homing Histogram showing the range of movement speed during homing from one tracking location to the next one (m/h).

Model results—Influence of weather on movement speed File contains Table S1 on model selection, Table S2 showing all model-averaged coefficients and the discussion of the model results.

Summarized results of tadpole transport trajectories Each row represents a specific tracking event. Columns show the frog ID, number of tadpoles, tracked distance, total time of the tracked path (h), average speed (m/h) across the entire TTs, number of deposition sites visited (in parentheses the number of available (a) and non-available (n) deposi...

The influence of fission-fusion dynamics, i.e., temporal variation in group size and composition, on social complexity has been studied in large-brained mammals that rely on social bonds. Little is known about birds, even though some species like ravens have recently received attention for their socio-cognitive skills and use of social bonds. While...

Natal dispersal is a well-studied phenomenon that can be divided into three stages: (1) starting from an area, (2) wandering to another area and (3) either settling in that area to breed or merely temporarily stopping there before continuing to wander. During the third phase, we can distinguish breeders from non-breeders, which may show similar or...

In many songbirds the space use of breeders is well studied but poorly understood for non-breeders. In Common ravens, some studies of non-breeders indicate high vagrancy with large individual differences in home range size, while others show that up to 40% of marked non-breeders can be regularly observed at the same anthropogenic food source over m...

Group living individuals are frequently confronted with a variety of different stressors with social context being one of the most potent ones. Even though the activation of the physiological stress response is adaptive in nature, it may have pathological consequences, for instance by negatively affecting the immune system, which is linked to paras...

Affiliative interactions may buffer an individual’s stress response and ultimately enhance reproductive success. The aim of this study was to determine behavioural interactions of breeding partners in the Northern Bald Ibis (Geronticus eremita), a critically endangered bird with a seasonal monogamous mating system. The free flying colony of the Kon...

The social intelligence hypothesis, originally developed for primates to explain their high intelligence and large relative brain size, assumes that challenges posed by social life in complex societies with many group members lead to the evolution of advanced cognitive abilities. In birds, pair-bonded species have larger brains than non-pair bonded...

Introduction The ability to relocate home or breeding sites after experimental removal has been observed in several amphibians and the sensory basis of this behavior has been studied in some temperate-region species. However, the actual return trajectories have rarely been quantified in these studies and it remains unknown how different cues guide...

Conspicuous male colouration is expected to have evolved primarily through selection by female choice. In what way conspicuous colours could be advantageous to males scrambling for mates remains largely unknown. The moor frog (Rana arvalis) belongs to the so-called explosive breeders in which spawning period is short; intrasexual competition is str...

Gaze following is the ability to use the visual orientation of others as a trigger to look in the same direction. Thereby, animals may either align their head and eye orientation with others (gaze following into distant space) or may even reposition themselves to look behind barriers impairing their perception (geometrical gaze following). It has b...

Social context has been shown to encourage, or to delay object exploration and learning. This ambiguity might be due to factors such as social relationships and personality of the individuals involved. Here, we investigated in ravens (Corvus corax) individuals' consistency in response to novel objects over development and across contexts: alone ver...