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How do animals navigate their way through the landscape? Imagine a group of friends having to decide where to go, and how to get there. Chances are, the group will use prior knowledge—doing something that several group members have done before. This is because doing something completely novel risks resulting in unfavourable outcomes. Animal groups in the wild face this challenge every day, with potentially severe consequences to making bad decisions. Further, time is a critical resource, and delays caused by making decisions can result in the loss of opportunities (e.g. resources might be taken by other groups). One way of avoiding these negative consequences is to build on previous experience, and to establish ranging routines. While this is fairly logical, surprisingly little is known about how important these routines are in the day-to-day decisions that animal groups make. This project will investigate whether routines contribute on maintaining the home ranges of different groups of vulturine guineafowl (Acryllium vulturinum), a species endemic to East Africa and studied in central Kenya. Specifically, our project aims to investigate whether the decisions that groups make when moving from one part of their home range to another is predicted by their previous movements. Vulturine guineafowls are a striking and highly social bird. Individuals live in cohesive, stable groups throughout their lives, and these groups are non-territorial, meaning that home range of groups are highly overlapping. In this project, we will use a long-term and fine-scaled GPS datasets to identify the routes previously taken by each group, ask if these previous route use can predict the current movements of the same group, and test if the routes taken through a given area are specific to each group. This represents an exciting opportunity for a student to work on a rich dataset, and join an active group working on these types of questions.
Open to discussion
If you want to know more about us and our projects visit our website: Social Evolutionary Ecology lab.
If you are interested in this work, please send a brief letter of motivation (1-2 paragraphs) outlining why you wish to join the project to:
Prof. Dr. Damien Farine
(cc Mina Ogino)
Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich
Last update: 17.05.2023
Movement is a key way that animals do exhibit behaviours. It provides opportunities for organisms to increase their fitness, for example, by moving to new resources or escaping predators. However, the act of moving is also metabolically costly, which can drive the evolution of optimized movement strategies—where to move, how fast, and when. For example, we recently demonstrated that dispersing birds exhibit distinct changes in behaviour that allow them to mitigate the costs of making long-distance movements. However, in social species, the ability for individuals to move efficiently may be constrained by the demands of the social environment—such as the need to maintain cohesion with group members—with implications for their ability to optimize their energy expenditure. This Masters project will combine video, high-resolution GPS, and electrocardiography (ECG, or heart rate) data from wild terrestrial birds (vulturine guineafowl, Acryllium vulturinum) to quantify the energetic costs of moving and interacting within a social group.
Starting date open
If you want to know more about us and our projects visit our website: Social Evolutionary Ecology lab.
If you are interested in this work, please send a brief letter of motivation (1-2 paragraphs) outlining why you wish to join the project to:
Prof. Dr. Damien Farine
Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich
Last update: 23.05.2023
The capacity for innovation, social learning and culture is vital to the success of humans, facilitating our colonization of almost every habitat on Earth. But has culture been a determinant of success in any other species? Urban environments present a natural experiment to investigate these questions, as cities provide novel challenges and opportunities that animals need to respond to over short time-scales. Our recent research on one urban-adaptor, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, has described the spread of one innovation, flipping bin lids to raid household food scraps in Sydney Australia. In this work, and the help of citizen-science, we mapped emergence and geographic spread of this behaviour to observe the formation of a local ‘bin-opening culture’. However, people have now responded to this behaviour by protecting bins with a variety of methods. Our evidence for social learning of bin protection by people (and anecdotal observations that birds can defeat measures) leads to the potential for an interspecies cultural arms race. This masters project will investigate whether this is occurring by using a combination of observations and experiments to test where, when and how cockatoos can defeat bin protection measures. The project will combine spatial mapping and citizen science approaches with wild fieldwork on habituated cockatoos in eastern Australia.
Starting date open
If you want to know more about our lab and projects visit our website.
If you are interested in this work, please send an email with a brief letter of motivation (1-2 paragraphs) outlining why you wish to join the project to:
Prof. Dr Lucy Aplin, Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Last update: 02.05.2023
Project description
I am advertising MSc projects focusing on wild chacma baboons in the Waterberg district of the Limpopo province, South Africa. The main research goal is to improve our understanding of the role of sexual conflict as a selection pressure shaping physiology, male-female relationships, and paternal behavior.
Together with local and international field assistants and students, you will collect behavioral, endocrinological, genetic and ecological data while following habituated chacma baboon troops.
The study site – also home to vervet monkeys and bushbabies, to name only the primates – is located on the Swebeswebe Wildlife Estate, approximately 50km from the town of Lephalale. You will also contribute to the general running of the research camp set in the rugged bushveld with magnificent wildlife. The research camp provides all necessary amenities including free fast internet access.
Requirements
You should be in possession or close to obtaining a bachelor’s degree in biology or Biomedicine from the University of Zurich (or another Swiss University). Previous field experience is desirable, but not essential. You should be physically fit and resilient.
Project start
Start dates of MSc Projects are flexible.
Contact
For additional information and to apply please contact Dr. Tony Weingrill, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Also visit the website
Primate Reproductive Strategies and Socioendocrinology
Last update: 25.01.2024
This MSc project will focus on identifying the acoustic variation in alarm calls related to the context in which they are produced in a semi urban vervet monkey population. In particular, we are interested in studying responses to dogs, and other anthropogenic introduced threats in the habitat of this population. The project entails 6-8 months field work at the Simbithi Eco Estate at the East Coast of South Africa. You will be working in a small team and beside recording monkey vocalizations you will contribute to the projects general data collection.
Applications should include a CV and a motivation letter why you are particularly suited/ interested in this research. If you are interested or would like to have further information regarding this project, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us:
Dr. Sofia Forss, Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Prof. Dr. Marta Manser, Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland
More information about our research groups under:
Animal Curiosity and Cognition
Communication and Cognition in Social Mammals
Flyer (PDF, 431 KB)
Last update: 02.05.2023
Master's projects in Ecology and Environment
Master's projects in Evolutionary Biology
