Zoologie & Tierökologie – Zoology & Animal Ecology

Welcome to the Zoology & Animal Ecology group!

The group was founded in January 2025 and studies how animals adapt to their environment using various tools from ecology, life-history, behaviour and physiology. In particular, we´re interested how fast adjustment mechanisms relying on plastic adjustments can help animals to adjust to changing environments. In this context, we run several projects:

The team

Prof. Dr. Anja Guenther

Dr. Andreas Berghänel

Prof. Dr. Stefan Flohr

Dr. Patricia Kahle

Dr. Torsten Richter

Dr. Carsten Witzel

Doctoral researchers:

Karem Stephania López-Hervas

Alexandros Vezyrakis 

Fragkiskos Darmis

Ekaterina Gorshkova

technical assistant:

Kerstin Schaefer

We study wildlife responses´ to human impact B

Human activities cause unprecedented alterations to environments worldwide — from climate change and habitat destruction to overharvesting and the introduction of invasive species. These human-induced rapid environmental changes expose organisms to evolutionary novel conditions that typically involve higher rates of change compared to those experienced in their evolutionary past. In many species this results in a decline of abundance while some species, so-called “urban dwellers”, thrive, even in the most drastically altered environments - cities. To understand success or failure of animals to cope with human-altered environments, we address several topics.

Characterising and understanding the traits that enable animals to cope well with human-altered environments will prove pivotal to predict species and populations trends in the future. One cornerstone of the groups research focuses on characterizing traits that enable successful animals to thrive in novel and/or human-altered habitats. Candidate traits that have emerged recently in the literature comprise specific behavioural traits, e.g., more risk-prone animals seem to cope better with environmental change, but, more generally, include traits indicating behavioural flexibility. Behavioural flexibility, i.e., the ability to change a behaviour based on updated information from the environment, often relies on cognitive functions such as the ability to learn and remember. Because elevated cognitive abilities and therefore flexibility, are assumed to be energetically costly, brain size/volume as well as energy-demanding traits, e.g., sexually selected traits, life-history traits related to growth/reproduction etc., are predicted but not yet thoroughly empirically tested as further candidate traits. 

Projects:

• Who are the innovators and what makes them so innovative?
• How is problem-solving affected by the environment, by natural and sexual selection?
• Which aspects of the urban habitat facilitate problem-solving?

We study the mechanisms underlying fast adjustment mechanisms

1. Early life influences & phenotypic development

Non-genetic influences of the (grand)- parental phenotype contribute strongly to the early environmental experience, and such inter- and transgenerational (epigenetic) effects may even resemble heritable (genetic) effects. Non-genetic inheritance patterns may allow adaptive adjustment of the offspring phenotype to the prevailing environment or allow for phenotypic adjustments to environmental change much faster than evolutionary mechanisms.

One line of our research therefore focusses on investigating how phenotypic plasticity allows animals to adjust either flexibly (via developmental plasticity) or across few generations (via transgenerational plasticity) to predictable and unpredictably varying environments. Using combinations of observations under natural or semi-natural conditions and experimental manipulations of the early environment or internal states, we ask:

Projects:

• How a change in environment, e.g., nutrition, social density or temperature, affect phenotypic development within and across generations
• If there are negative effects on fitness when adjusting to a changed environment
• How hormones and gene expression drive the adjustment to changed environments

2. Ecological and social drivers of phenotypic adjustments

On a mechanistic basis, energy allocation decisions are of pivotal importance to facilitate survival and reproduction in an optimal fashion. Animals acquire energy from food through metabolic processes and allocate the available energy to functions such as survival (maintenance), growth, and reproduction. Food availability and temperature therefore determine energy allocation and variation in energy allocation is the cause of seasonal breeding seen in many mammal species. Many mammals of the temperate regions rely on variation in photoperiod to anticipate seasonal changes in habitat productivity rather than reacting only after environmental conditions have changed. Species relying on the high predictability of photoperiodic cues, might show only little flexibility in allocation decisions and thus suffer particularly strongly from climate change.

Projects:

• What are the proximate mechanisms inducing seasonal variation in breeding?
• Does seasonal flexibility in reproduction predict physiological and behavioural flexibility?
• Does this flexibility in seasonal breeding correspond to how species cope with climate change and urbanisation?

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