about

I want to share my passion about bats by providing some pictures and video footage from fieldwork in Costa Rica and Panamá.

I am a PhD student working in the tropical ecology group of Prof. Marco Tschapka in the Insitute of Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Genomics, University of Ulm, Germany. My supervisor is Mirjam Knörnschild from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany.

In my dissertation project, I use an experimental approach to investigate the extent and mechanisms of social learning in flower-visiting bats of different age. Inter alia, my research comprises experiments on mouth-to-mouth feeding behavior in mother-pup pairs and its potential implications on vertical social learning of dietary preferences in non-volant pups.

I further developed artificial flowers with RFID system to record the incipient foraging behavior of recently volant pups and their mothers in the wild and I also work on adult individuals (e.g. horizontal social learning of novel flower types; playback experiments on mediating cues). Experiments are performed with bats that are temporarily kept in captivity as well as with free living individuals. Fieldwork of my ongoing study is conducted in Santa Rosa National Park, Costa Rica.

I am also working for bat-related biological assessments and, as a volunteer, on the conservation of european bats within the Fledermausschutz Neu-Ulm.