Events Detail

Speaker:
Meg Crofoot, University of Konstanz and Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour

This event is part of an event series „Seminar Series of CASCB“.

View the recording of Meg's talk here

Meg Crofoot is the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour and a Humboldt-Professor at the University of Konstanz. Generally speaking, her research area focuses on collective behavior and ecology. She is interested in analyzing group dynamics of the many small-scale interactions for the whole of the animal collective. She explores how animal groups coordinate their collective movements and decision-making processes in their natural habitats by combining GPS transmitters with drone footage of the surrounding vegetation and environmental conditions, resulting in accurately tracking every single individual in the heard simultaneously. Based on this precision data, she can retrace complex decision-making processes within animal collectives.

The Collective Ecology of Animal Societies

In social species, the actions and interactions of group-mates can combine to create emergent patterns of behaviour that transform their social and physical environment. How does selection, acting on individual phenotype, shape such collective behaviours? How do group-level traits then feedback to impact individual fitness? These questions are central to understanding how species with complex social systems evolve, but are difficult to address, particularly in large, long-living species.  In this talk, I will discuss the analytical, experimental and technological methods we are developing in my lab for investigating collective behaviour in wild animals, and present ongoing research on decision-making in baboons and cultural innovation and the emergence of tool-use traditions in capuchins.