Welcome to my homepage!
I am a behavioural ecologist by training with a particular interest in animal navigation - not only to improve my own navigational skills when sailing.
In the field of animal navigation, I am most captivated by how animals find back to certain significant places such as their nest or burrow or a rewarding feeding site.
During my PhD and beyond, I studied how desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) find back to their nest on a fairly straight path after a long and tortuous outbound run
and how they manage to return to the same feeding site during their next foraging trip. Despite their miniature brains and simple neural systems,
the ants achieve this challenging and difficult task by keeping a total running of all directions steered and distances covered;
this process is called path integration.
The path integrator, however, only leads the ant close to the nest from where the animal has to start searching for the tiny entrance hole in the ground.
In my research, I also studied this searching behaviour, the
systematic search, most extensively. I found that it is very effective and flexible as
it gets adapted to the distance of the
preceding foraging excursion.
Having always been fascinated by the complexity of animal behaviour, I studied zoology/biology at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität München. For my diploma thesis (equivalent to Masters), I explored the social ecology of Japanese monkeys on Yakushima, a small island south of Kyushu. I then continued to follow my research interests in animal ecology and social systems and studied two species of bush shrikes in South Africa. In 2003, I moved to Bonn where I took up my PhD project and focused on path integration and systematic search strategies in desert ants. Based in the Theoretical Biology group at the Universität Bonn, I developed a mathematical model of path integration and conducted a number of field experiments with desert ants in Tunisia (North Africa). I published my findings in several peer-reviewed journals and received my PhD in 2007. Early in 2008, I started working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. This new research project used fiddler crabs in their natural environment to investigate the ecology of habituation. Habituation is a decrease in responsiveness to events that are frequently and repeatedly encountered, the rules of which I studied in the context of predator avoidance.
Having always been fascinated by the complexity of animal behaviour, I studied zoology/biology at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität München. For my diploma thesis (equivalent to Masters), I explored the social ecology of Japanese monkeys on Yakushima, a small island south of Kyushu. I then continued to follow my research interests in animal ecology and social systems and studied two species of bush shrikes in South Africa. In 2003, I moved to Bonn where I took up my PhD project and focused on path integration and systematic search strategies in desert ants. Based in the Theoretical Biology group at the Universität Bonn, I developed a mathematical model of path integration and conducted a number of field experiments with desert ants in Tunisia (North Africa). I published my findings in several peer-reviewed journals and received my PhD in 2007. Early in 2008, I started working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. This new research project used fiddler crabs in their natural environment to investigate the ecology of habituation. Habituation is a decrease in responsiveness to events that are frequently and repeatedly encountered, the rules of which I studied in the context of predator avoidance.