Evolutionary Ethology Lab
Communication, cognition and behaviour

A central focus of our lab is how bats communicate with one another and how social and ecological conditions shape behaviour. We investigate vocal communication, social interactions, mating systems, mother–offspring behaviour, and the ways in which individuals differ in their responses to challenges and opportunities. By combining behavioural observations, field experiments and phylogenetically comparative approaches, we ask how communication systems function in everyday social life, how behavioural flexibility arises, and how social behaviour evolves across species and contexts.

We study the evolutionary consequences of learned vocal behaviour. In bats with socially learned songs and regional dialects, we investigate how vocal traditions emerge, how they are transmitted, and whether they influence mate choice, dispersal and population divergence. This work is particularly relevant to the question of whether animal culture can act as an evolutionary force alongside natural and sexual selection. By linking behavioural, acoustic and genomic data, we aim to understand whether culturally transmitted signals can contribute to reproductive isolation and ultimately promote speciation.

Bats are exceptional systems for studying how animals gather, process and use acoustic information. We examine how sensory ecology and cognition interact in navigation, foraging choice, and social behaviour. We investigate how bats perceive biologically relevant sounds, how they make decisions based on sensory input, and how learning and cognitive processes shape their responses in ecologically realistic situations. Using playback experiments, behavioural tests and field-based approaches, we aim to better understand how acoustic sensing supports adaptive behaviour and how cognition operates in the natural world.

We investigate the neural and molecular basis of vocal production in bats, combining behavioural, bioacoustic and neurobiological approaches. By comparing species that differ in vocal learning capacities, we study how social context shapes brain activity during echolocation and social vocalizations, where vocal motor control regions are located, and how neural circuits for vocal behaviour evolve. The broader goal is to understand the biological foundations of mammalian vocal communication in a comparative framework.

We use bats as mammalian models for investigating evolutionary building blocks of human language. We are interested in traits such as vocal imitation and its ontogeny, and the production and perception of hierarchically structured vocal sequences. By combining observational and experimental approaches in a comparative framework, we ask which components of language-like communication are present in other mammals, how such traits develop, and what they can tell us about the evolutionary origins of complex vocal communication.

We use bioacoustics for biodiversity research, acoustic surveys, long-term monitoring, and the analysis of scientific sound archives. We work with animal sound recordings, automated acoustic analysis and machine-learning methods to extract ecological and behavioural information from large audio datasets. This enables us to study species occurrence, acoustic communities and temporal change, and to improve the scientific value of sound collections. The broader objective is to strengthen the role of bioacoustics as a tool for research, monitoring and conservation in the context of rapid environmental change.

We study how bats forage, roost and adjust their behaviour in natural habitats vs. in human-altered environments. Our work examines bats’ responses to anthropogenic changes such as rising temperatures, degraded habitats and wind parks. We also investigate the ecosystem services bats provide, such as insect suppression, pollination and seed dispersal, and how these functions may be altered in a rapidly changing world. By linking behavioural ecology with conservation, we aim to generate knowledge that supports evidence-based protection of bats and their habitats.