Events Detail

Speaker:
Marta Manser, University of Zurich

This event is part of an event series „Animal Sociality Seminar“.

Marta Manser is a Professor of Animal Behaviour at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at University of Zürich. Her group is interested in the understanding of animal societies. They investigate proximate and functional aspects on group coordination (leadership and group decisions) and in particular, communication and cognition in mammals. She is director of the Kalahari Meerkat Project (together with Tim Clutton-Brock), the base of several long-term individual-based research projects, including the famous long-term study of wild meerkats, which has been running for more than 25 years.

Vocal complexity in mammals with varying social structure

With a comparative approach, we identify what selective factors favor communicative complexity (e.g., vocal repertoire size, variation in call structure within call types, call combinations, etc…) and the underlying cognitive mechanisms. We focus on phylogenetic closely related or sympatric living species showing variation in their social structure. Based on behavioural observations of habituated animals in their natural habitat we test specific hypotheses with field experiments, and also on captive animals.