Members: Jordan – Department of Collective Behaviour

Principal Investigators

Alex Jordan

Alex studies the complex social and collective systems of animals great and small – the ways single individuals come together to form much larger groups, and the feedback between the behaviour of groups and that of the individuals that compose them. His research program encompasses field studies in Africa, Australia, and the Americas, and lab approaches including molecular genetics, neurobiology of social interactions, and socio-cognitive behavioural assays. His group aims to understand both the proximate mechanisms and the ultimate outcomes of social interactions and behavioural plasticty. His research group page is here

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Ph.D. Students

Bin Ma

bma(at)ab(dot)mpg(dot)de

Bin obtained his degree BSc in Aquaculture from Southwest University (China) in 2015, and his MSc in Environmental Science from Dalian Ocean University (China) in 2019. He studies the ways social contexts affect behaviour and autonomic stress responses in social cichlids. He is also interested in understanding how the brain and behavior can be shaped by the social environment. Bin has funded a 4-year scholarship by the China Scholarship Council.

Etienne Lein

elein(at)ab(dot)mpg(dot)de

Etienne is using the Taganyikan Lamprologine cichlids in both lab and field to study the implications of sociality on brain anatomy, neural activation networks, and cognition. His work aims to uncover the substrates of social behaviour and determine the causes of variation in response to social stimuli among individuals and species.

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R. Ian Etheredge

ian.etheredge(at)ab(dot)mpg(dot)de

Ian is a computational ethologist interested in understanding the relationship between perception, behaviour and social organisation. During his PhD, he is exploring the role of these dynamics in mate choice, extended cognition and group competition. He asks how animals actively shape their perception of the environment, the perception of themselves by others and the effect of the social context on these processes.

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Masters Students

Jakob Guebel

Jakob uses digital reconstruction techniques to quantify connectivity on spider webs and will be employing these techniques to understand social group structure and collective movement in the field.

Paul Nuehrenberg

Paul studies the collective foraging behaviour of groups of Lamprologus callipterus known as ‘rolling’, using empirical and modeling approaches.

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Sylvia Fernanda Garza

sgarza(at)ab(dot)mpg(dot)de

Hola!! I am Biology Master’s student working on spider social behavior. Currently, I am working on Nephila spiders’ mating interactions, specifically, the males’ strategy to approach a female, as well as how these interactions change when males have competition.