Since my PhD on mixed species associations in arboreal primates, my
research focus has been on interspecific interactions between vertebrates.
I am most interestet in the evolution and maintainance of mutualism in the
light of the risk of exploitation, using the cleaning mutualsim between the
wrasse Labroides dimidiatus and other reef fish as the main model system.
I will soon extend this project by including another cleaner wrasse L. bicolor,
a species that, in contrast to L. dimidiatus, lacks cleaning stations and thus
makes it hard for clients to achieve a repeated game.
In addition, I have worked on predator-prey relationships in my study on
the primates, and I currently investigate a viariety of interspecific cooperative
hunting systems (among others between groupers and moray eels) in the
Red Sea and signalling aspects between prey fish and groupers.
A further project focuses on the interactions between sabre tooth blennies
and their reef fish victims out of which the blennies bite bits of flesh.
These interactions interest me in particular as the victims may punish the
blennies but face the tragedy of the commons problem with their conspecifics
who also benefit from any punishment action against the blenny without
bearing the costs of punishment. Thus again, this project deals with social
dilemmas and how they can be solved under natural conditions.
Finally, I recently started a project on a flowering plant-pollinator mutualism
to understand why plants (usually) offer nectar rather than trying to save the
energy for other tasks. A key point is to produce crossing lines of Petunia
plants that offer less nectar than usual and let their natural pollinators interact
with a mixed population to look for any negative consequences of reduced
nextar provisioning.
In parallel, I became more and more interested in the cognitive and
physiological mechanisms that underlie the behaviour of my study animals.
Cooperation and cheating has been linked to the Machiavellian Intelligence
Hypothesis, which states that the evolution of a large neocortex in primates is
linked to social complexity. We test this idea in a comparative approach,
exposing a variety of cleaner fish species to the same cognitive experiments.
Finally, I just joined a major field project on vervet monkeys in South Africa,
led by Dr. Louise Barrett (University of Lethbridge),
Prof Leslie Brown (University of Pretoria),
Prof Peter Henzi (University of Lethbridge) and
Prof Ronald Noë (University of Strasbourg).
My focus will be on aspects of culture.
Other collaboration partners regarding the fish and plant-insect projects:
Prof Hans Fricke, MPIV Seewiesen: interspecific cooperative hunting in
fishes
Dr. Alexandra Grutter, University of Queensland: cleaning mutualism
Dr. Rufus Johnstone, University of Cambridge: game theoretic modelling
of cooperation
Prof Rui Oliveira, ISPA, Lisbon: behavioural endocrinology of fishes
Dr. Lucie Salwiczek, University of Cambridge: non primate animal cognition
Prof Wolfgang Wickler, MPIV Seewiesen: non primate animal cognition
