Logo of the Comparative Behavioral Ecology group showing a grackle and a human face inside a tree

Dieter Lukas

My research focuses on the causes and consequences of sociality to reveal…

…the ecological conditions shaping …that with whom individuals live guides their …how social interactions affect

Social Organisation

the distribution of individuals in space and time

Social Behavior

the patterns of interactions among individuals

Social Structure

the distribution of power and resources within societies
A picture showing two groups of lions in their separate territorities, each containing multiple females and fewer males. A graphic illustrating that in lions, cooperation primarily occurs among females within groups, mating occurs within groups, and interactions between groups are characterized by aggression between the males. A graphic showing that in lion groups, males tend to rank higher than females, but that there is no clear hierarchy among the females in a lion group.



Below are some of the projects I am currently involved in. Contact me in case you are interested in developing a project to apply for funding. For more on the vision and code of conduct of my research team please see the pages of the Comparative Behavioural Ecology group.

Sharing and reproduction

Across animals, risks and resource availability in the environment influence the timing and investment in reproduction. We are interested whether in humans transfer of resources might mean that reproduction is more shaped by the social than the ecological environment. With Pablo Jose Varas Enriquez

Dominance interactions

Competition between individuals is a fundamental aspect of the evolution of mammalian societies. Is it beneficial for individuals to rank above others of the same sex? With Elise Huchard, Oliver Höner, and Marie Charpentier.

And when would we expect that individuals of one sex have more power than individuals of the opposite sex. With Elise Huchard, Peter Kappeler, Claudia Fichtel, and Nikos Smit.

Behaviour and expansion

I am a collaborator on the great-tailed grackle project. This project investigates whether behaviour plays a role in their adaption to new environments. My particular focus is on understanding the mating and dispersal behaviour across their expansion range. With Corina Logan.



To gain these insights, I innovate bespoke, hypothesis- and population-specific statistical models that guide data collection. My approach involves developing Bayesian techniques in data analysis methodology to recreate the likely processes that generated the data. 

Comparative analyses

Reconstructing the likely sequence of changes that occurred in the past can uncover whether certain conditions make the evolution of behaviours more or less likely.

Meta-analyses

In nature, we don’t expect the relationship between two variables to be always the same, but to change according to circumstances. We accordingly need methods to account for this variation and to be able to make predictions of what the relationship might be in other situations.

Process-based statistics

By matching the statistical analyses to the processes that generated the data can provide additional power and insights. We can simulate data to determine minimal sample sizes, and match the results to the specific predictions.