New paper out in Frontiers in Physiology

November 11th, 2021 / News Paper

I am happy to say that an exciting paper that I worked on with Shaun Killen, Christos Ioannou, and others is now available online in Frontiers in Physiology. In the paper we line out physiological performance curves, the nonlinear changes in the physiological traits and performance of animals across environmental gradients, and discuss their potential to change social behaviour and group functioning, and the ecological consequences

Figure depicting how animals physiological performance may hypothetically change across different environmental variables (A) and the way in which individuals my differ from one another in their performance curves (B).

The paper leans heavily on my 2020 TREE paper with Shaun and Andrew King, but goes further by focusing on individual heterogeneity in variability between individuals. The work is mostly theoretical because there is still very little empirical work done, so looking forward to test some of the ideas myself with Shaun and colleagues next year in terms of how fish differ in how they respond to severe droughts. You can download the paper open access here!

Reference
Killen, S. S., Cortese, D., Cotgrove, L., Jolles, J. W., Munson, A., and Christos, C. (2021). The potential for physiological performance curves to shape environmental effects on social behaviour. Front. Physiol. 12, 754719. doi:10.32942/osf.io/bh968.

Collaborators Shaun Killen & Lucy Cotgrove visiting

June 18th, 2018 / Blog News

The last couple days Shaun Killen and Lucy Cotgrove from the University of Glasgow visited me in Konstanz to work together on a couple of exciting projects. Shaun and I started collaborating about a year ago to bridge the fields of animal physiology, animal personality, and collective behaviour.

With help of a Zukunftskolleg mentorship grant, we recently started writing an opinion paper on the topic, as well as analysing an exciting experiment with Lucy on the role of individual differences in metabolic rate on collective movement dynamics of schooling fish.Read further…

Invited seminar Glasgow University

May 26th, 2017 / News Talk

This week I visited Shaun Killen in Glasgow and gave a seminar at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine. Three stimulating days with lots of productive discussion and research ideas for collaboration on the relationship between physiology, personality differences and collective behaviour. Really great to meet the Killen lab and drink some proper Ales and Whiskeys. Thanks to Shaun for hosting me!