Single Review on past events

Jolle Wolter Jolles is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg affiliated with the Department of Biology and the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology.

Collective animal behaviour is all around us. One of the biggest advancements in our understanding of collective behaviour has been the discovery that many seemingly complext coordinated behaviour can be explained by simple yet universal interaction rules. However, it has become very apparent in recent years that many social animals show large consistent differences in their behaviour, with wide-ranging implications for many ecological and evolutionary processes. This raises the important question of whether individual heterogeneity also constitutes a fundamental organisational principle within animal groups, with large potential consequences for the emergence of collective properties and the functioning of animal groups. With support of the Zukunftskolleg Jolle has started to develop an interdisciplinary research programme with the aim to unravel this link between consistent behavioural variation, the emergence of collective properties and group functioning, and in turn individual fitness and between-group dynamics. During his talk he gave an introduction to the fields of collective animal behaviour and animal personality and explained his approach to link the two fields using a mechanistic approach. He also went through a number of recent studies of his, using stickleback fish, that show individual differences can drive collective behaviour and group functioning.