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The 11th European Conference on Behavioural Biology (ECBB) 2024, the largest European meeting for animal behavior scientists, was held at the Irchel Campus of the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland on July 16-19, 2024. It was a joint conference with the Summer Meeting of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB). The theme of this year’s conference was ‘long-term studies in animal behavior’, but any topic in behavioral biology was welcome. The participants were invited by the Zurich Zoo, to continue discussions in a stimulating environment after the end of the conference. The organizing committee included Marta Manser, Damien Farine, Anna Lindholm, and Lucy Aplin.
ECBB 2024 was attended by over 300 people representing 33 different countries. The conference program included 168 talks within well attended four parallel sessions, and 86 posters, as well as four plenary speakers cumulating to the highlights of the meeting over the three exiting days. Barbara König (UZH) summarized in a brilliant put together tale her long-term work on house mice. Christina Riehl (Princeton) represented a highly enthusiastic young investigator getting caught by her study system on greater ani birds, turning into a long-term study. Finally, Tim Clutton-Brock (Cambridge), in his >50 years legendary role in multiple mammalian long-term studies emphasized the drive following individually recognizable animals over many decades and generations, its immense importance and influence, and its challenges to maintain them.
Dr. Zegni Triki was this year’s Tinbergen Awardee, sponsored by the Ethologische Gesellschaft e.V.. She ended the conference with a fascinating final plenary talk on fish cognition, keeping the audience’s attention from the first to the last minute with critically reviewing the field and her own research as an early career scientist, reflecting the excitement of the field of animal behavior. The award for best poster, sponsored by PeerJ, went to Dr. Ana Cerveira for her poster "Know thy food: Cyrba algerina’s (Araneae, Salticidae) response to prey cues requires previous experience".
Session topics included a wide range of themes of current great interest, such as animal personality, social behavior, physiology and behavior, cooperation, conservation and behavior, foraging, communication, movement ecology, sex and reproduction, parental care, collective behavior, and of course long-term studies. Long-term studies, where identifiable individuals are followed over generations, allow us to explore the evolution and function of behavior in a unique and immensely important way. The Faculty of Science, at the University of Zurich, supports many researchers involved in such long-term field sites. This was memorable shown by the poster decoration representing some of the many animal systems investigated by UZH researchers, including terrestrial mammals from rodents, carnivores to primates and humans, marine mammals, birds and amphibians.
Modern multi-disciplinary approaches and new technologies allow us to dive further in, gaining novel insights into mechanisms but also identifying selective forces on behavior that were not possible before. The importance of behavioral biology is to understand the interactions within species as well as between a species and its environments, the adaptations to their habitat, and the constraints and limitations imposed on them. In many ways, these aspects become even more visible with climate change. Why certain behaviors evolved is crucial for the estimates of the value of biodiversity. And of course, animal behavior will also enable us to identify the evolutionary basis of our own behavior. The excitement about behavioral biology was felt throughout the three days, and the wish to cooperate by researchers from different disciplines to advance our knowledge seems almost limitless, giving this field much space and visibility in science for the future.
