New paper on relatedness and social networks across different bats

Last year, I attended a symposium hosted by Peter Kappeler at the German Primate Center on the topic of "social complexity". A bunch of evolutionary and behavioral ecologists from different backgrounds got together to argue about stuff like 'How should we define social complexity?', 'Is the brain size of a species a good of measure … Continue reading New paper on relatedness and social networks across different bats

Nov 2018 updates

Events: Nov 7-9 at Ohio State University: Modeling and Analysis of Dynamic Social Networks (I'm giving the first talk at 1pm) Nov 8 Seminar: "Wireless tracking sensor network give novel insights into the (social) life of bats" by Simon Ripperger. (1:00–2:00pm, Room 110, Orton Hall, The Ohio State University). Simon is visiting my lab this … Continue reading Nov 2018 updates

Updates: June 2018

A few updates: I'm delighted to announce my first three graduate students at Ohio State University: Bridget Brown, Theresa Chen, and Imran Razik. Read more about them here. Theresa and Imran have both won competitive fellowships from the university. We published a study showing that younger vampire bats are more exploratory than adults. They are far … Continue reading Updates: June 2018

Fieldwork: Lamanai, Belize

This week I’ve been working with a team of bat researchers in Lamanai, Belize (an archaeological site of the ruins of a Mayan city). We are collecting data for a study on the effects of sickness behavior on social associations in wild vampire bats. Last year, PhD student Sebastian "Basti" Stockmaier and I conducted two … Continue reading Fieldwork: Lamanai, Belize

Some pics from Panama and Germany

I'm finally seeing bats flying around here at dusk in Germany, and for the first time I'm missing Panama a bit. But it's not that I don't like Panama, I just love where I am now! I've been trying to make the most of my time here, and that's my excuse for not writing a blogpost … Continue reading Some pics from Panama and Germany

Tracking our vampire bats after they are released into the wild

After almost 2 years of cooperation experiments in captivity, we are now attempting to monitor the social relationships of our vampire bats as we release them back into the wild. We are hoping to track bat-bat and bat-cow encounters. To do this, we are attaching networked proximity sensors to 23 previously captive and captive-born bats … Continue reading Tracking our vampire bats after they are released into the wild

Final month in Panama

I have only one month left in Panama! We wrapped up data collection for our captive experiments, and we are now shifting to fieldwork. On June 28, I hired our last research intern for Panama, Darija Josic (MSc in Biology), a bat researcher from Croatia. She is helping both Sebastian Stockmaier and I with looking … Continue reading Final month in Panama