© Universität Bielefeld
Sea Lion Project Galápagos
- Oliver Krüger (Head of Project Group)
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Pricipal Investigator of Animal Behaviour
The unifying feature of my different research projects is life history strategy evolution, the way natural selection optimises the entire life of an organism. Differences between individuals and their life histories are evaluated by natural selection on the basis of fitness. Hence it is of paramount importance to measure fitness if we want to attach biological meaningfulness to animal behaviour. However, animal behaviour and life history strategies do not evolve in isolation. Individual behaviour is bound to have consequences at the population level and, conversely, populations set the stage for the evolution of life history strategies and animal behaviour. As a consequence, by studying life history strategies, my research is encompassed by a triangle of evolution, ecology and ethology. Only detailed knowledge of individual fitness allows one to decompose individual behavioural variation into components of genotypic and phenotypic quality, as well as environmental effects.
- Jonas Schwarz
- Svenja Stöhr
- Alexandra Kate Childs
- Fritz Trillmich (Professor emeritus, advisory)
We investigate life history- and reproductive strategies.
Sex, age at maturity, litter size, offspring size at birth and length of reproductive cycles count among important life history features. Reproduction represents one of the most important aspects in the life history of an individual and parental care represents one important component of fitness. One focus of our investigations concerns allocation decisions and trade-offs in parental care. As parental care is a valuable and limited resource, conflict about parental care is expected. Our investigations are carried out using guinea pigs, cavies and sea lions.
We focus on:
- Plasticity of behaviour and physiology
- Allocation decisions
- costs of reproduction and brood care
- parent-offspring conflicts
- reproductive strategies of males and females
- effects of an unpredictable environment (global warming) on population dynamics