KLI Colloquia are informal, public talks that are followed by extensive dissussions. Speakers are KLI fellows or visiting researchers who are interested in presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience and discussing it in a wider research context. We offer three types of talks:
1. Current Research Talks. KLI fellows or visiting researchers present and discuss their most recent research with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
2. Future Research Talks. Visiting researchers present and discuss future projects and ideas togehter with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
3. Professional Developmental Talks. Experts about research grants and applications at the Austrian and European levels present career opportunities and strategies to late-PhD and post-doctoral researchers.
- The presentation language is English.
- If you are interested in presenting your current or future work at the KLI, please contact the Scientific Director or the Executive Manager.
Event Details
Topic description:
Marine fishes live in complex environments and show complex behaviors. I study their mating systems, and symbiotic behavior:
- I will give a guided tour through fish reproductive behavior, which includes nest building, monogamy, life birth, mouth brooding and male pseudo-parasitism. One strategy which is curiously missing is eusociality, and I will argue that this is due to the physical and biological boundary conditions found in the ocean. Specifically, long-range dispersal of larvae, sparsity of resource bursts, and the temporal frequency of physical disturbances in the oceans make the evolution of eusociality unlikely.
- A highly interesting symbiosis is the cooperation between gobies (small perciform fishes) and alpheid shrimp, where the shrimp constructs a burrow and the goby acts as a watchman. Using a database of fish anatomy, we show that the fish does NOT invest extra energy into its visual system as a consequence of the symbiosis. Lastly, I will present preliminary work on the possible neurobiological basis of the fish-shrimp communication system.
Biographical note:
Klaus M. Stiefel did his undergraduate work at the University of Vienna (microbiology) and his doctoral work at the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (zoology/neuroscience). Research stints at the Salk Institute (La Jolla, USA), OIST (Japan) and the University of Western Sydney (Australia) followed. Currently Klaus is affiliated with the Neurolinx Research Institute (La Jolla, USA) and is based as an independent scientist in the Philippines, the epicenter of marine biodiversity. Klaus' research interest include fish biodiversity, reproduction & symbiosis (in marine biology) and neural oscillators (in neurobiology).
