Annual topical meeting of the Ethological Society

From EESwiki

Annual topical meeting of the Ethological Society (Ethologische Gesellschaft) Rebecca Wutzler Regensburg, Feb. 20th – 22nd, 2008

From 20th - 22nd February I attended the Annual topical meeting of the Ethological Society (Ethologische Gesellschaft) at the University of Regensburg. This year the topic was “Social behaviour” and therefore about 110 behavioural biologists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland took the opportunity to present their current work.

As expected from this focus the meeting was dominated by talks and posters dealing with results investigated from social insect systems. Four out of the six invited speakers gave an interesting insight into the behaviour of different social systems of Hymenoptera. The other two invited talks were from very different fields of ethology working on mammals. I was interested most in the talk of Simone Sommer (Berlin) with the topic: “MHC and Mate Choice in Primates: Effects on Reproduction” because in my Diploma Thesis I compared MHC and relatedness as genetic criteria for mate choice in Tree Shrews.

I presented my Diploma Thesis as a poster and got a lot of feedback and helpful suggestions. Between the talks I could make new contacts and join a lot of fruitful discussions. I also had the opportunity to talk directly to Simone Sommer at the Congress dinner and we discussed the results of my studies this included my current work as PhD student at the MPI for Ornithology where I am analyzing MHC - diversity and mate choice in Blue tits.

Although it was a rather small meeting everything was very well organized. For me as a new member it was a very good chance to get to know other members of the Society and to discuss my work with experienced researchers from several fields of behavioural biology as well as topic related ones.