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:
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?
We study the impact of animal behaviour conservation efforts
Behaviour is generally the first and the fastest mechanism by which animals adapt to their environment and respond to changes in it. Behavioural ecology examines how animals cope with new situations, new habitats, risks and interactions with other individuals, and how these factors influence population dynamics. The study of animal behaviour is therefore increasingly recognised as an important tool in conservation research and contributes to a better understanding of how individual behaviour interacts with environmental conditions. In order to assess the long-term success of reintroduction programmes, it is important to understand how animals react to the stress of a new and unfamiliar environment or how they cope with predator risks in a new habitat.
One dimension of behaviour that is already known to encompass important aspects for nature conservation, particularly reintroduction programmes, is variation along an axis ranging from shyness to boldness. It is measured by individuals’ reactions to new environments, objects or sounds, their acceptance of predator risk, their flight response and vigilance, and their movement within an ecosystem. It has been demonstrated in various species that boldness can also be associated with faster growth, earlier onset of sexual maturity, covering greater distances and greater reproductive success, but with a shorter lifespan in males. Across species, shy individuals have lower reproductive success but tend to have a longer lifespan and greater sensitivity to predators, leading to a lower risk of being eaten. In addition, their dispersal distances are often shorter, which may result in isolation for newly established populations and, consequently, genetic impoverishment. Furthermore, it is also assumed that behavioural flexibility is advantageous for animals when they enter new environments or when their familiar surroundings change. At the individual level, flexibility can arise through innovation, whereby an individual ‘invents’ a new behaviour, or through social learning, whereby an individual adopts a behaviour used by others. Just like personality traits, individuals of the same species differ significantly in such rates of innovation.
Using modern RFID-technology, we (that means the AG Zoology & Animal ecology together with the AG Feldhamsterschutz Niedersachsen e.V.) are currently investigating how individual behavioural differences of the common hamster (Cricetus cricetus), influences its reintroduction success in Lower Saxony, how it interacts with activity and space use patterns after release and whether it can predict survival and fitness and thus, ultimately, population development.
