Wolfgang Forstmeier

•    Mate choice
•    Sexual behaviour
•    Sexual antagonism
•    Evolutionary genetics
•    Behavioural mechanisms
•    Statistical methods
•    Reproducibility
I study sexual behaviour and mate choice in birds to address fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. My research aims at arriving at a more sophisticated understanding of sexual courtship and mate choice. Studying captive populations of zebra finches and ruff sandpipers, I examine the extent to which mate preferences are unanimous or individual specific, and I examine how such preferences develop based on previous experiences. I am interested in mechanisms of sensory exploitation and in mechanisms that determine behavioural compatibility of mates.

Ongoing Projects
•    Ontogeny of mating preferences and behavioural compatibility
•    Emotional contagion
•    Homosexual behaviour
•    Individual identity signalling
•    Parallels between courtship and commercial advertising
•    Sexual imprinting and species recognition learning
•    Fitness consequences of inversion polymorphisms
•    Inheritance of the germline-restricted chromosome