About
36
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Introduction
I am passionate about animal behavior and communication, and my work has mainly been focused on sexual selection and secondary sexual signals, including chemosensory, acoustic and visual communication. I am also interested in sexual dimorphisms, ecological immunity, life-history evolution, host-parasite interactions, and social learning. I study both, adaptive functions and proximate mechanisms of behavior, mostly in wild and wild-derived animals under semi-natural and laboratory conditions.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (36)
Ultrasonic vocalizations (USV) convey information about individual identity and arousal status in mice. We propose to track USV as ridges in the time–frequency domain via a variant of time– frequency reassignment (TFR). The key idea is to perform TFR with empirical Wiener shrinkage and multitapering to improve robustness to noise. Furthermore, we p...
Low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diets (KDs) are used to treat drug-resistant epilepsy, and other potential benefits for treating neurological disorders, metabolic syndrome, and cancer are being explored. In addition to these and other medical applications, KDs have also become popular for rapid weight-loss and enhancing athletic performance. H...
Male house mice (Mus musculus) produce complex ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), especially during courtship and mating. Playback experiments suggest that female attraction towards recordings of male USVs depends on their social experience, paternal exposure, and estrous stage. We conducted a playback experiment with wild-derived female house mice (...
Exposing female house mice (Mus musculus) to male urinary scent accelerates their sexual development (Vandenbergh effect). Here, we tested whether exposing juvenile male mice to females’ urine similarly influences male growth and size of their sexual organs. We exposed three-week old male house mice to female urine or water (control) for ca. three...
Male house mice (Mus musculus) produce complex ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), especially during courtship and mating. Playback experiments suggest that female attraction towards recordings of male USVs depends on their social experience, paternal exposure, and estrous stage. We conducted a playback experiment with wild-derived female house mice (...
Exposure to males or male urinary scent can induce and accelerate the rate of female estrous cycling in house mice ("Whitten effect"), and this response has been replicated many times since its discovery over 60 years ago. Here, we tested whether exposing female mice to recordings of male courtship ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) induces estrous cy...
House mice communicate through ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), which are above the range of human hearing (>20 kHz), and several automated methods have been developed for USV detection and classification. Here we evaluate their advantages and disadvantages in a full, systematic comparison, while also presenting a new approach. This study aims to 1...
Male house mice excrete large amounts of protein in their urinary scent marks, mainly composed of Major Urinary Proteins (MUPs), and these lipocalins function as pheromones and pheromone carriers. Here, we review studies on sexually dimorphic MUP expression in house mice, including the proximate mechanisms controlling MUP gene expression and their...
Exposure to males or male urinary scent can induce and accelerate the rate of female estrous cycling in house
mice ("Whitten effect"), and this response has been replicated many times since its discovery over 60 years ago.
Here, we tested whether exposing female mice to recordings of male courtship ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs)
induces estrous cy...
The major urinary proteins (MUPs) of house mice (Mus musculus) bind and stabilize the release of pheromones and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from urinary scent marks, which mediate chemical communication. Social status influences MUP and VOC excretion, and the urinary scent of dominant males is attractive to females. Urinary pheromones i...
House mice communicate through ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), which are above the range of human hearing (>20 kHz), and several automated methods have been developed for USV detection and classification. Here we evaluate their advantages and disadvantages in a full, systematic comparison. We compared the performance of four detection methods, Dee...
The major urinary proteins (MUPs) of house mice ( Mus musculus ) bind and stabilize the release of pheromones and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from urinary scent marks, which mediate chemical communication. Social status influences MUP and VOC excretion, and the urinary scent of dominant males is attractive to females. Urinary pheromones...
Males in a wide variety of taxa, including insects, birds and mammals, produce vocalizations to attract females. Male house mice emit ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), especially during courtship and mating, which are surprising complex. It is often suggested that male mice vocalize at higher rates after interacting with a female, but the evidence i...
Acoustic communication mediates many types of social interactions; however, few studies have investigated
whether courtship vocalizations contain distinctive individual signatures necessary for individual
recognition. Male house mice, Mus musculus, produce spectrally complex ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs)
during courtship and mating, which appear...
Acoustic communication mediates many types of social interactions; however, few studies have investigated whether courtship vocalizations contain distinctive individual signatures necessary for individual recognition. Male house mice, Mus musculus, produce spectrally complex ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during courtship and mating, which appear...
Background:
Courtship vocalizations are used by males of many species to attract and influence the behavior of potential mating partners. Our aim here was to investigate the modulation and reproductive consequences of courtship ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) in wild-derived house mice (Mus musculus musculus). The courtship USVs of male mice are s...
Many species in diverse taxonomic groups, including rodents, bats, and insects, communicate with complex ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) (>20 kHz). Two main components of processing and analyzing USV recordings include detection and classification of syllable types. Recently we developed an efficient algorithm for detecting mouse USVs (Automatic Mo...
House mice (Mus musculus) emit ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), which are surprisingly complex and have features of bird song, but their functions are not well understood. Previous studies have reported mixed evidence on whether there are sex differences in USV emission, though vocalization rate or other features may depend upon whether potential r...
Data: Total number of elements, frequencies and amplitudes of emitted USVs.
(XLSX)
House mice (Mus musculus) emit complex ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during social and sexual interactions, which have features similar to bird song (i.e., they are composed of several different types of syllables, uttered in succession over time to form a pattern of sequences). Manually processing complex vocalization data is time-consuming and...
There is remarkable diversity in brain size among vertebrates, but surprisingly little is known about how ecological species interactions impact the evolution of brain size. Using guppies, artificially selected for large and small brains, we determined how brain size affects survival under predation threat in a naturalistic environment. We cohoused...
Female house mice (Mus musculus) show preferences
for the scent of healthy versus infected males, which
may function to reduce risks of disease transmission or to
obtain healthy, disease-resistant mates. It is not known whether
such odor preferences result in differential male reproductive
success (sexual selection), and therefore, we performed
mat...
The ability to discriminate between related and unrelated individuals has been demonstrated in many species. The mechanisms behind this ability might be manifold and depend on the ecological context in which the species lives. In brood-caring species, both familiarity and phenotype matching are known to be used in kin recognition. However, results...
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is increasingly becoming an important model species for studies on the genetic and neural mechanisms controlling behaviour and cognition. Here, we utilized a conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm to study social learning in zebrafish. We tested whether social interactions with conditioned demonstrators enhance the...
Secondary sexual displays may be overlooked in many species, especially when they are ephemerally expressed or imperceptible to human senses. Zebrafish (Danio rerio), like many schooling fish, do not appear sexually dichromatic, but previous anecdotal observations indicate that sexual colouration is expressed briefly during courtship (ephemeral nup...
Social learning probably functions as a mechanism to acquire public information about food, predators and conspecifics, without paying the costs required for individual learning. Social learning should be strategic rather than indiscriminate, and although it is often suggested that animals should show conformity (‘copy the majority strategy’), ther...
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Zebrafish are an intensively studied model organism, and yet there are no studies describing the reproductive behaviour of wild zebrafish. Here we investigated the reproductive behaviour of wild-caught zebrafish (Danio rerio) from India in large (1100 l) aquaria containing gravel and plants and low population densities. We observed the behaviour of...
We investigated sex recognition in female zebrafish (Danio rerio) to better understand the underlying sensory mechanisms and identify male secondary sexual traits. Females were simultaneously
presented with two fish, a male and a female, in a flow-chamber apparatus, and females’ relative attraction towards males
was observed under different conditi...
Secondary sexual characters often provide indicators of a male’s resistance to infectious diseases to rivals and potential
mates, but it is unclear why. It is often suggested that males honestly signal their health due to energetic and other physiological
trade-offs between investing into secondary sexual traits vs resistance to infectious diseases...
Females may be attracted to males genetically resistant to infectious diseases, and one potential mechanism for this mating bias is that such males may be better able to maintain high testosterone. To test these two hypotheses, we collected scent-marks from male house mice (Mus domesticus) genetically resistant and susceptible to Salmonella due to...
Many chemical pollutants have become ubiquitous in the environment, including some that interfere with hormones and other physiological mechanisms. These ‘endocrine-disrupting chemicals’ (EDCs) have harmful effects on development and physiology. We reviewed published evidence and found that EDCs also have adverse effects on a wide range of behaviou...
Males of many species produce scent marks and other olfactory signals that function to intimidate rivals and attract females. It has been suggested that scent marks provide an honest, cheat-proof display of an individual's health and condition. Here we report several findings that address this hypothesis in wild-derived house mice (Mus musculus dom...
The acanthocephalan parasite Pomphorhynchus laevis is transmitted by crustaceans such as Gammarus pulex to its paratenic or final hosts, fish. The conspicuous orange-yellow parasite is visible through the transparent cuticle of G. pulex. Infected gammarids are significantly less photophobic than uninfected ones. When hungry three-spined stickleback...
