For information about Alex please go here
Principal Investigators
Ph.D. Students
Bin Ma
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
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.
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.
Sylvia Fernanda Garza
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.
Alumni/Former Members
Alex Boehm
Alex studies social ontogeny and hierarchy within networks of the cichlid Neolamprologus multifasciatus
Kai Schleifer
Kai’s interests include everything that moves, crawls and swims. He is using 3D behavioural tracking and digital web reconstruction approaches to understand how social and aggregative spiders communicate and create collective structures.
Melanie Wickert
Melanie is studying how the structure of social groups affects information flow and influence networks in communities of Lamprologine cichlids.
Robert Felbier
Robert is modeling social interactions in communal spiders to understand how aggregations of otherwise aggressive individuals can form and be maintained.