Rebecca Chen has successfully defended her PhD with a Summa cum laude! 🎉

We’re thrilled to congratulate her and even more thrilled that she’ll be staying with the group a little longer!🙏

A great opportunity is available for a three year PhD studentship to work on ton mutation load dynamics in a cooperatively breeding mammal, the banded mongoose!

The deadline for applications is 30^th January 2026. All materials should be submitted to the online portal of Bielefeld University via this link. The reference for the position is: Wiss25540.

Read more here or see see the attached PDF for more details about the position and do not hesitate to contact me with any questions at joseph.hoffman[at]uni-bielefeld.de.

Massive congratulations to Ramona for successfully defending her PhD thesis last December! 🎓🥳 We wish you all the best in your new job and adventures Down Under! 🦘 🐨 🐋

As a team building exercise the lab went on a kayaking tour of ca 8km on the Werre in Herford, Germany. It was a very beautiful tour and we saw many king fishers, herons and other birds. The pictures speak for themselves!

Four of our lab members presented their work at the Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB 2025) in Barcelona in August. Beril presented a pilot study linked to her multi-pinniped comparative genomics project, which looks into differences in genomic inbreeding and bottleneck strength as a consequence of historical sealing across South American fur seal populations. Rebecca presented her recently published study on the effects of mutation load on sexual trait expression and reproductive success in lekking black grouse. Kosmas presented some new results on the distribution of mutation load and inbreeding across different Antarctic fur seal colonies. Finally, Anneke got the opportunity to present results from a joint project led by David about the effects of inbreeding on Antarctic fur seal female reproductive success.

As a bonus, the event coincided with the “Festes de Gràcia”, a street festival in a neighborhood of Barcelona called Gràcia with beautiful street decorations, music and dance. ESEB 2025 joined in by incorporating themes of evolution and biodiversity in the street decorations and other activities. Of course ESEB attendees were welcomed to join in on the festivities, which were great fun!

We had a great conference with many interesting presentations and thought-provoking discussions.

A massive congratulations to Jonas for successfully defending his PhD thesis “Dissecting complex chemical phenotypes in the Antarctic fur seal“! We wish him all the best in his new job!

Last week Anneke successfully defended her PhD titled “Genetic dissection of anthropogenic impacts on a declining Antarctic fur seal population“. Congratulations dr Anneke! 🥳🎓 Luckily we don’t have to say our farewells yet, as Anneke will continue working on her Antarctic fur seal project as a postdoc in the group 🦭

Two of our lab members presented their work at the 36^th Annual Conference of the European Cetacean Society in Ponta Delgada, Azores in May 2025. Both presented recent work from their PhD projects on Antarctic fur seals. Petroula presented her work on host-microbiome interactions from birth until weaning, and Ane Liv presented a project using an autonomous fixed camera and a machine learning approach to identify patterns of predator-prey interactions. We thoroughly enjoyed the conference, which featured lots of interesting workshops, inspiring talks and cool discussions!

Some of our members were lucky enough to present their work on the SMM2024 in Perth, Australia! Below an impression of post-doc David, presenting the recent paper that’s in press about Northern elephant seals, Ramona presenting her recent work on polar ocean soundscapes and ecoacoustics, and Ane Liv presenting her poster on trait decomposition in Antarctic fur seals!