Carsten Schradin

I study mammalian social evolution in a combination of long-term field studies and large-scale comparative studies. Since 2001 I conduct long-term field studies in South Africa to understand how behavioural and physiological flexibility allows animals to behave adaptively in their changing natural environment. For this I study socially flexible African striped mice that can switch their social organisation between solitary and group-living. I then proceeded to study such intra-specific variation in social organisation comparatively in all mammals. These studies indicated that the mammalian ancestor was sociable and flexible, and that solitary living in mammals might be a derived adaptive state. This led to a new long-term field project where we study the costs and benefits of solitary living in bush Karoo rats, which is important to understand mammalian social evolution and to contribute to the conservation of the many solitary mammalian species.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZmAXySr-EM&authuser=0