Michael Griesser | Research Associate

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Research Interests

My research explores the evolution of family living in birds, showing that family living is a pivotal steppingstone for the evolution of cooperative kin societies. I rely on a long-term study population of Siberian jays, a family-living bird species, to explore the evolution of kin cooperation and cognition using field experiments, population models, genetic tools and comparative work. I am also engaged in the FutureGreenForestry project looking into the link between avian biodiversity and forestry in Central European and boreal forests.

 

Research Projects

The Evolution of family living and kin cooperation

Cooperative breeding is an extreme form of cooperation that evolved in a range of lineages, but the factors favouring its evolution remain debated. Based on an analysis of ca. 3000 bird species, we showed that this behaviour evolved in two steps (Griesser et al. 2017). First, families formed by prolonging parent-offspring associations and second, these offspring began helping at the nest. We then showed that although the formation of families is associated with productive environments, albeit highly variable ones, the subsequent evolution of cooperative breeding is linked instead to low environmental productivity. These findings are consistent with patterns in insects and mammals (including humans) (Burkart et al. 2017), and clarify current disagreements on the role of environmental forces in the evolution of cooperation. They also emphasize the importance of considering path-dependency when exploring evolutionary drivers of complex adaptations.

Family living, a safe haven to acquire vital life skills

A Siberian jay breeder with its independent offspring feeding, an unrelated non-breeder in the back.

My ongoing work investigates the mechanisms and fitness consequences of family living, using my long-term field study system, the Siberian jay. In this bird species, groups are composed of both, offspring that remain beyond independence in the family group, and unrelated non-breeders, providing a natural experiment to assess the role of kinship in social interactions among group members (Ekman and Griesser 2016). I have demonstrated that family living is highly adaptive as parents provide their independent offspring with nepotistic access to food (Griesser et al. 2015) and protection from predators (Griesser et al. 2006, Griesser 2013). Moreover, parents provide their offspring with opportunities to acquire vital life skills, such as predator recognition (Griesser and Suzuki 2016, 2017), boosting the survival of retained offspring and their opportunities to become breeders in a high quality territory.

The evolution of language-like features in animals

Breeder chasing the unrelated non-breeder from the food.

Language is a defining feature of humans, but given its uniqueness, it is difficult to study the factors that ultimately drove the evolution of language. Thus, language evolution has been suggested to be the most difficult question to answer in science. One key feature of human language is declarative, referential communication. The expressive power of these references arises from combinatorial abilities, allowing us to produce meaningful words and sentences from a limited set of meaningless units (i.e., phonemes) and meaningful units (i.e., words). My past and ongoing research (in collaboration with Dr. Toshitaka Suzuki) demonstrated that birds have evolved several features that are also critical elements of language: referentially (Griesser 2008) and syntactic combinations (Suzuki et al. 2016, 2017, 2018), where elements with meaning are combined into more complex messages. These results suggest that language-like features also evolved in birds. Our ongoing work aims at developing hypotheses that can explain the evolution of these features in general, and thus, could help to understand language evolution (Griesser et al. 2018), using Siberian jays and Japanese tits.

 

Selected Publications (see here for all publications)

  • Suzuki, T. N., D. Wheatcroft, and M. Griesser. 2018. Call combinations in birds and the evolution of compositional syntax. PLoS Biology 16.8:e2006532. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2006532
  • Layton-Matthews, K., A. Ozgul, and M. Griesser. 2018. The interacting effects of forestry and climate change on the demography of a group-living bird population. Oecologia 186.4:907-918. DOI: 10.1007/s00442-018-4100-z
  • Griesser, M., S. M. Drobniak, S. Nakagawa, and C. A. Botero. 2017. Family living sets the stage for cooperative breeding and ecological resilience in birds. PLoS Biology 15:e2000483. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2000483
  • Suzuki, T. N., D. Wheatcroft, and M. Griesser. 2017. Wild birds use an ordering rule to decode novel call sequences. Current Biology 27:1-6. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.06.031
  • Griesser, M., and T. N. Suzuki. 2017. Naïve juveniles are more likely to become breeders after witnessing predator mobbing. American Naturalist 189:58-66. DOI: 10.1086/689477
  • Burkart, J. M., C. P. van Schaik, and M. Griesser. 2017. Looking for unity in diversity: cooperative childcare in humans in a comparative perspective. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences:20171184. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.1184
  • Griesser, M., and T. N. Suzuki. 2016. Kinship modulates the attention of naïve individuals to the mobbing behaviour of role models. Animal Behaviour 112:83-91. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.11.020
  • Suzuki, T. N., D. Wheatcroft, and M. Griesser. 2016. Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls. Nature Communications 7:10986. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01171
  • Ekman, J., and M. Griesser. 2016. Siberian jays: delayed dispersal in absence of cooperative breeding. Pages 6-18 in W. D. Koenig and J. Dickinson, editors. Cooperative breeding in vertebrates: Studies of ecology, evolution, and behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107338357.002
  • Griesser, M., P. Halvarsson, S. M. Drobniak, and C. Vila. 2015. Fine-scale kin recognition in the absence of social cues in the Siberian jay, a monogamous bird species. Molecular Ecology 24:5726-5738. DOI: 10.1111/mec.13420
  • Griesser, M. 2008. Referential calls signal predator behavior in a group-living bird species. Current Biology 18:69-73. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.11.069
  • Griesser, M., D. Wheatcroft, and T. N. Suzuki. 2018. From bird calls to human language: exploring the evolutionary drivers of compositional syntax. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 21:6-12. DOI: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.11.002