Main Focus
I am a behavioural ecologist and ornithologist. My main interest is sexual
selection and the evolution of avian mating behaviour. I want to understand how
males and females find a mate. How do they sample potential partners? Why do
they divorce? I want to understand why some individuals, and in particular
females, are unfaithful to their partner. How common are extra-pair
copulations? How does promiscuity influence sexual selection? I want to
understand the causes of variation in individual mating behaviour. Is mating
behaviour age- or condition-dependent or is the variation maintained through
frequency-dependent selection?
I am a field biologist. I am coordinating and carrying out field studies on a
variety of arctic-breeding shorebirds with different mating systems.
I am leading the Department of Ornithology, a highly international group of
behavioural ecologists. We ask how sexual selection acts as a driver of
biodiversity. We study the processes that underlie sexual selection and their
consequences for the evolution of behavioural and life-history traits. Our work
is characterized by technology-assisted behavioural observations on large
numbers of individuals in free-living populations, complemented by observations
on captive individuals, and a quantitative approach using state-of-the-art
statistical methods. We also conduct comparative analyses to test hypotheses
about the evolution of key phenotypic traits such as plumage colour. To this
end, we maintain and develop a database
that links life-history traits of the world's ~10,000 bird species with
environmental and ecological data.
Birds are powerful and tractable systems for understanding the astonishing
diversity of adaptations encountered in the wild. A key aim of our work is to
reveal which traits are affected by sexual selection, i.e. relevant for mate
choice and for successful competition for mating. We study a variety of species
with different
mating systems and consider both obvious candidate traits such as parental
care, colour and song characteristics, and less obvious ones such as seasonal
and daily timing of behaviour, activity and sleep, and dispersal and site
fidelity.
Information on Prof. Dr. Bart Kempenaers' research can be found on the website of his Department of Ornithology.