Research

I am currently a postdoc at the Center for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at Universität Konstanz and in the Social Evolutionary Ecology group at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour/University of Zurich. I am currently investigating the dynamics between social and physiological interactions in different systems.

I started exploring my hypothesis of how the physiology of group members interact with each other by combining fine-scale tracking of individuals with large-scale manipulation experiment under controlled laboratory conditions. This setup allowed me to explore, for example, how one or few stressed group members can affect the physiology, behaviour, and performance of the group as a whole. This project is part of an interdisciplinary collaboration with psychologists and immunologists at University of Konstanz that aims to understand general processes of stress transmission across vertebrates by conducting comparable experiments in humans, mice, fish, and birds (the latter led by me). Inspired by discussions within this interdisciplinary team, I recently compiled a perspectives article on the role of stress transmission in animal collectives (Brandl et al. 2022), and contributed to a large multi-author paper highlighting how an animal’s behaviour, physiology, social environment, and the socio-economic processes emerging from it are in a constant dynamic feedback with each other (Cantor et al. 2021).

Following the success of the first phase of the project, I am now a PI on the follow-up phase that started in May 2022. My aim is to study the drivers and consequence of stress in different wild social systems, like Siberian jays, vulturine guinefowl and great tits. I want to continue focusing on understanding the consequences and carry-over effects of stress that animal societies experience, which is a highly relevant topic in a world that is undergoing rapid changes.

The aim of my PhD, jointly between the University of Hamburg and Macquarie University, was to understand how social processes help birds survive in unpredictable habitats. I studied wild zebra finches at the Fowlers Gap research station, in outback NSW. To achieve my aims, I set up an RFID-decoder system to track their social interactions inside and outside of their breeding colonies, allowing me to explore their consequences and carry-over across contexts. I tested key hypotheses by (i) manipulating visitation rate using playing back recordings of begging calls of differently sized broods (Brandl et al. 2019), (ii) experimentally manipulating brood sizes on a large scale (Brandl et al. 2018), and (iii) locally varying the distribution of nest boxes at different nest stages (Brandl et al. 2019). I found that birds did not use the social information as an indicator of the quality as a breeding habitat , but rather monitored the nest progress of neighbours to synchronise reproduction with them. I then quantified social associations across a population containing multiple breeding colonies, finding that social associations within colonies were maintained until long after the reproductive period (Brandl et al. 2021). Finally, I examined the contribution of environmental factors shaping social interactions, specifically the role of stress arising from sibling competition in the nests. I found that early life stress exposure led to juveniles being more gregarious and less choosy in their foraging association, resulting in more central positions in their social networks after fledging (Brandl & Farine et al. 2019).