A visual glimpse into our fieldwork, experiments, and the people behind the science. I actively share media and insights from our work on instagram and youtube, of which you can find a selection below!
Photo gallery
Videos
An overview of my research on heterogeneity & collective behaviour
I teamed up with a Berlin filmmaker to create this 3min short to give both a nice overview of my research as well as insights from the different aspects of my work, from catching fish, setting-up experimental systems, writing my own recording and tracking software, to analysing data.
Walking through dry riverbed of intermittent river in Catalunya
Short fragment of us walking through the dry riverbed of the Borró river to document changes in water availability and fish abundance. Like most rivers in the Mediterranean, this stream is strongly intermittent and large parts turn dry most of the year, with fish having to survive in small refuge pools.
Highly polarised school of Bodensee
This short video shows a very nicely aligned (polarised) school of sticklebacks swimming in the shallow waters of the Bodensee near the Limnological Institute. I was able to get relatively close while snorkelling in the ice-cold water in early spring. All sticklebacks in the lake are very large and easily reach 10cm. The individuals in this school are all very similar in size and 2+ year old.
Automatic tracking of three-spined stickleback shoal
This video showcases the tracking of a small group of sticklebacks using my custom tracking software (ATracker). Different features of the tracking are dynamically shown and hidden, including background subtraction, social proximity network creation, vectoring, and individual trajectories.
Territorial sticklebacks in the Bodensee
A video taken while snorkelling in the Bodensee looking for nesting sticklebacks. This video shows some very brightly coloured males near their territories and larger shoals composed of mainly female sticklebacks swimming in the vicinity of the male breeding grounds.
Sociability & boldness in stickleback pairs
This video accompanied one of the papers arising from my PhD. By tracking the movements of interacting pairs of sticklebacks, we found that bolder fish led more and were less responsive to their partner and that pairs of bold fish had low cohesion. In contrast, pairs of shy fish showed high social attraction and strongly coordinated their behaviour. Read the paper.
Fish tracking & visual field reconstruction
This video shows the tracking and visual field reconstruction of a single stickleback in a large maze-like environment. Tracking and raycasting are performed using my custom Python package ATracker, which we are currently implementing in the analyses of our experiments on individual differences and collective behaviour in fish.
Automated tracking of individual boldness
This video shows the tracking of an individual stickleback in a standard boldness assay. With my Python package I am able to automatically acquire the latency for a fish to go out of cover, the proportion of time out of cover, the distance moved out of cover, the maximum distance out of cover, as well as other detailed movement characteristics such as its speed, heading and orientation.
Pike hunting in the reeds of the Bodensee
While snorkelling in the Bodensee, I found a large number of pikes stalking juvenile fish in the reeds along the shores. The pikes here can easily get over a meter in length and are actually quite easy to approach to within a couple meters when quiet. Beautiful to see these hunters up close in the wild, which has helped inform our predator-prey interaction experiments.
Agent-based model simulations
To investigate the role of individual differences in collective behaviour, we run agent-based simulations of self-organising, heterogeneous groups of agents varying in speed and goal-orientedness. This video shows small groups moving in a boundary-less environment, with faster agents becoming leaders. These results are integrated in our 2017 Current Biology paper.