Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

After migrating to their wintering grounds, the animals move as little as possible to conserve energy

The year 2024 saw Max Planck scientists publishing exceptional research across disciplines. We have selected twelve highlights to share

Chimpanzees perform the same complex behaviors that have brought humans success

A twenty-year study in Congo’s largest protected park confirms that rangers are effective in preserving endangered bonobos

After immigrating to a new place, birds rapidly learn useful tricks from local experts

Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, formed ten million years ago, boasts an extraordinary diversity of species. For decades, researchers have flocked to its shores to study its unique ecosystem. Among them is Alex Jordan from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, who considers the lake a paradise. With the aid of modern technology, Jordan aims to analyze the behavior of the cichlids that live in Lake Tanganyika.

Iain Couzin, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Constance, and his team want to discover the rules that schools of fish follow as well as the advantages of life in the collective. Cutting-edge technology is helping the researchers to find order amid the chaos.

Baboon troops are famous for sticking together as they traverse the savannah in search of food. For almost a decade, Meg Crofoot, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, has been studying a group of olive baboons in Kenya to understand how they do this – how they overcome their individual differences to band together, make a decision, and move forward as one.

The International Space Station (ISS) orbits the Earth around 16 times a day from an altitude of approximately 400 kilometers; each orbit takes a good 90 minutes. The ISS, which is about the size of a football field and has been manned continually since November 2000, is constantly being converted and expanded – also in the services of science.

Even though the evolution of human cognition has remained one of the biggest mysteries in Evolutionary Biology, it is becoming increasingly clear that our ability to learn from other individuals must have played a pivotal role. Our research aims to shed light on how human-like knowledge transmission evolved by studying social learning in one of our closest relatives, the orangutan.

Birds are among the most important animal groups in biological, medical and pharmaceutical sciences. Over the last few years, new technologies have made genome sequencing accessible to a broad user base. The international B10K project is an initiative to sequence the genomes of all bird species. Comparative studies on trait evolution on the genomic level will lead to a far-reaching understanding of biodiversity and connections towards translational research. The Max Planck scientists in Radolfzell participate in this project with comparative studies on the immune system evolution of birds.

It is well established that urban areas have been successfully colonized by animals. Less is known about the extent to which urbanization causes ecological and micro-evolutionary changes in animals thriving in urban areas. Studies at the MPIO in Radolfzell elucidate that city life causes changes in behavior and underlying physiological mechanisms and that micro-evolutionary effects may play an important role. Current studies using newest radiotelemetry and micrologger technique aim to discover the impact of artificial city light at night on the daily and seasonal organization of urban animals.

The Southern Ocean is strongly affected by global change. A long-term study of Thin-billed prions, a small seabird feeding on zooplankton in these vast ocean areas, was designed to further our understanding of the changes that currently take place in this ecosytem. Further, this study will look at adaptations that enable the birds to cope with changing conditions, such as flexible provisioning behaviour and physiological regulation of timing and investments in the breeding cycle.

Individual marking and tracking of birds with inscripted rings at the bird's legs, radio transmitters or other methods is used for the study of the success of individual strategies, demographic benchmarks, the study of bird migration with all it's facetes and the role of birds as vectors for diseases, the long term monitoring of bird populations, the building of survival models, the study of the reaction of birds to climate change and finally the provision of basic data for species conservation.