PhD‐theses - Ethologische Gesellschaft

Reports from previous conferences
THE HOTTEST CONFERENCE OF THE YEAR!
Activities and Meetings
What do you normally do with the program booklet you receive at a conference? Probably,
you mark the talks you plan to attend. You might write down comments or ideas you get
during an interesting lecture. Maybe you even paint little stars or boxes while waiting for a
less exciting presentation to end.
Now, please imagine a lecture hall, where almost all the audience is fanning
themselves air with the program booklet. Different techniques are applied: Some fold the
booklet in the middle, to have a more robust hand fan. Some hold it on the long edge; some
on the small. Some with the right hand; some with the left. Some fan quickly; some slowly.
But all fan. Welcome to the V European Conference on Behavioural Biology!
Like every two years, behavioural biologists from all over Europe met to discuss
results, exchange ideas and chat with old colleagues. This year the ECBB took place in
Ferrara, Italy. Choosing an Italian city in the mid of July resulted in the supposedly hottest
conference of the year. Despite the extreme temperatures, Leonida Fusani, associate
professor at the University of Ferrara, and his team, managed to organise a sympathetic and
successful conference.
Elisabetta Visalberghi started the series of talks, by presenting the fascinating tool
using abilities of capuchins: Those little monkeys not only use stone tools to crack open nuts.
They also carefully select and transport the most appropriate tool for a specific task; an
ability so far mostly associated with great apes and humans. The human abilities of tool use
could be observed on the next day: Redouan Bshary, presenting the well‐deserved
Tinbergen award to Katharina Hirschenhauser with warm and appreciatory words, applied
all his manual skills to unwrap the bouquet of flowers. After finally receiving award and
flowers, Katharina gave us an appealing overview of her work on hormones and behaviour.
We learnt that the self‐perception of a fighter might be more important in the activation of
testosterone associated genes than the actual outcome of the fight. In her plenary talk, Joan
Strassmann gave an interesting introduction on the concept of organismality, applying this
to her groups present work on Dictyostelium discoideum. Her vivid and inspiring
presentation could even bring a true mammalogist to forget that it is "only" microbes, she is
talking about.
While Joan succeeded in presenting a whole world in a petri dish, Martin Wikelski
needed the entire globe. He gave us a broad overview of what he and his co‐workers were
and are achieving with the help of aircrafts, online databases (e.g.
http://www.movebank.org/) and possibly NASA. And also, what he might be doing, if there
was the money for it. To get a better grip on this money, he suggested, we European
behavioural biologists should unite forces. Also Joan Strassmann had an idea of how
corporative behaviour could improve our working success: She proposed, everybody should
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