Social Bond Meeting in Braunschweig (March 2019)
In March 2019, the SoHaPi 2 members met for a one-day get-together in Braunschweig, to discuss the difficult topic of measuring and comparing social bonds in different taxa. PhD candidate Virgile Manin presented the progress of his work on measuring social bonds in chimpanzees, which ended in a fruitful discussion. The meeting ended with a brief update on the progress in Project 8 (“Interactions of social organization and parasite and symbiont diversity”) by our Post Doc Jan Gogarten.
Conferences in February 2019
In February 2019, some of our SoHaPi students and PIs visited two conferences: the “14th Annual Meeting of the Ethologische Gesellschaft” in Hannover and the “16th conference of the Gesellschaft für Primatologie” in Göttingen. In Hannover, SoHaPi PhD candidate Katja Rudolph presented her newest findings on “The interplay of sociality, ecology, hormones and the gut microbiome composition of wild Verreaux’s sifakas” and won the “Gwinner Award” for the best student talk. CONGRATULATIONS KATJA! In Göttingen, SoHaPi PhD candidates Charlotte and Katja, and former PhD candidate Nadine Müller gave great presentations about their work. Charlotte spoke about "Determinants of parasite richness at the individual, group and population level in wild redfronted lemurs", Nadine focused on "Social and environmental transmission of gastrointestinal parasites in semi free-ranging Barbary macaques", and Katja presented her results "On the relationship among group size, health and ecology in a wild lemur population".
SoHaPi 2 Retreat in November 2018 (MPI Leipzig)
In November 2018, the SoHaPi 2 retreat took place at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. This time, we welcomed our three guest speakers James Higham (NY University, New York), Colin Chapman (McGill University, Montreal), and Malte Rühlemann (Kiel University, Kiel). Thanks to our guests, we gained new insights into behavioural endocrinology on the rhesus macaques of Cayo Santiago, behavioural and ecological determinants of social organisations in red colobus monkeys and novel techniques to examine links between the gut microbiome and inflammatory diseases.
