University studies and diplomas obtained

10/1985 - 11/1991: Study of Biology at Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich/Germany. Master thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute for Behaviour and Physiologie/Seewiesen (further abbreviated as MPIV), Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Jürg Lamprecht.

1/1992 - 10/1995:  Dissertations/theses Ph.D. at the MPIV, first supervisor: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wickler; second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gerhard Neuweiler. PhD degree on the 16/10/1995, awarded by the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich.

Professional/research experience

10/1995 - 8/1997: Post-doc at the MPIV, continuation of the PhD research on arboreal monkeys in the Taï National Park/Ivory Coast.

9/1997-8/2000: Start of own project financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG grants BS 2/2-1 to BS 2/2-4) on marine cleaning symbiosis at Ras Mohamed National Park, Egypt and on Lizard Island, Australia.

9/2000-8/2002: Marie Curie grant from the European Union to work with Dr. Rufus Johnstone at Cambridge, U. K., continuing the work on cleaning symbiosis (grant MCFI-1999-00473).

8/2002: Nico Tinbergen award from the Ethological Society (equivalent to the ASAB young scientist award)

9/2002 -6/2003: Research project collaboration between the MPIV and the Cambridge Zoology Department on game theoretic modelling, cleaning symbiosis and on interspecific cooperative hunting between groupers and moray eels (DFG grant BS 2/2-5)

7/2003-7/2004: Lecturer in behavioural ecology at the School of Biological Sciences at Liverpool University

Since 10/04: Professor in behavioural ecology at the University of Neuchâtel

Important tasks within the scientific community

Director of the Institute of Biology at Neuchâtel (2008-2012)
Secretary of the Decanat of the Faculty of Sciences/Neuchâtel
President of the Ethological Society (2010-2012)
Associate editor of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B (2006-2012)
Member of the Swiss Science Foundation Ambizione commission
Associate Board member of the Australian Research Council
Review editor of the journal Ethology (since 2015)
Dean of the faculty of sciences at Neuchâtel (2016-2018 & 2022-2024)

My research aim is to understand why individuals may help each other for direct fitness benefits, termed ‘cooperation’ within species and ‘mutualism’ between species. The general answer is well established: genes are not ‘selfish’ but ‘self-serving’, and hence there are conditions under which helping others is under positive selection. The challenge for empiricists is to understand the ecology, the physiology and cognitive tool kit of species, or even of individuals within species, in order to understand decision-making and hence the conditions under which stable cooperation or mutualism emerges. I aim to test game theoretic models and to refine them in collaboration with theoreticians, in particular Olof Leimar (University of Stockholm).

The cleaning mutualism between the wrasse Labroides dimidiatus and other reef fish has been and will continue to be the main model system. These cleaner fish remove ectoparasites from client reef fish but prefer to eat mucus, which constitutes cheating. While much of the initial research was conducted in the Red Sea, and some more research on Barbados and Moorea, we now fully focus on the Lizard Island Research Station, Great Barrier Reef. We try to understand how local conditions on the level of demes (i.e. individual reefs around Lizard Island) may affect brain development and decision-making, and even how inter-individual variation within demes may affect survival and growth. To achieve these goals, we follow marked individuals and record growth, movement, sex change, disappearance, social intra- and interspecific interactions, general fish densities and diversity, as well as coral cover and structural complexity. Some of the fish are caught, subjected to a test battery of cognitive experiments, and then used for brain analyses. With such detailed information, we aim to link ecology to brain development to cognition to previously recorded social behavior in nature.

A second important project investigates so-called ‘male services’ in vervet monkeys. In nature, most acts of helping either yield immediate benefits to the helper, or the delayed return benefits are relatively easy to identify.  One exception concerns male primates, which contribute more to vigilance, to anti-predator defense, and to between-group fighting than females do. Such behaviours take time and may be risky, and seem to benefit the entire group rather than targeted individuals. The benefits to males are less obvious. Our study on wild vervet monkeys at the Inkawu Vervet Project in KwaZulu-Natal/South Africa aims to understand why males provide such services. We investigate the relevance of services being a form of paternal investment versus services being a signal of quality in a system of reputation-based partner choice exerted by the females. We link variation in service provisioning to male tenure, genetic relatedness with infants/juveniles, hormones profiles and immune functions. The ‘true’ leader and soul of the project is Erica van de Waal (University of Lausanne).

A third project concerns the link between language and cooperation in humans. Although cooperation is widespread in nature, human cooperation is arguably far superior to other species and deserves special attention, also as a prime candidate driver for language evolution. The argument is that exceptionally high interdependence in humans led to a motivational and cognitive architecture that required exceptionally powerful communication. Although widely cited and plausible, this hypothesis is surprisingly understudied. To this end, we will study human cooperation and the ability to overcome cheating with a new generation of economic games, inspired by ecologically-valid dilemmas in animals. By comparing human levels of cooperation across conditions with other species, it will be possible to get a clearer understanding of the larger evolutionary forces that have shaped behavioural decisions across species and, of special relevance here, the role language plays in cooperative behaviour. The study is linked to the NCCR ‘evolving language’.

May favourite ‘hobby’ is to try to better understand vertebrate brain evolution. Vertebrate species show huge variation in brain size corrected for body size. There is variation of a factor 10 within endotherm species, within ectotherm species, and between the average brain-sized endotherm vs ectotherm species. What are the causes and consequences of such variation? How do we measure costs and benefits? And is brain size even an informative measure? This project links back to my research on cleaner fish, as these show a long list of surprising cognitive abilities, despite their small brains.

• Triki, Z., Emery, Y., Teles, M. C., Oliveira, R. F., & Bshary, R. (2020). Brain morphology predicts social intelligence in wild cleaner fish. Nature Communications, 11(1), 6423.

• Aellen, M., Burkart, J. M., & Bshary, R. (2022). No evidence for general intelligence in a fish. Ethology, 128(5), 424-436.

• Kohda, M., Sogawa, S., Jordan, A. L., Kubo, N., Awata, S., Satoh, S., ... & Bshary, R. (2022). Further evidence for the capacity of mirror self-recognition in cleaner fish and the significance of ecologically relevant marks. PLoS biology, 20, e3001529.

• Leimar, O., & Bshary, R. (2024). Social bond dynamics and the evolution of helping. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(11), e2317736121

• Triki, Z., van Schaik, C., & Bshary, R. (preprint 2024). The Fish Challenge to Vertebrate Cognitive Evolution. Ecoevorxiv, in press in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

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