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News

 New study published in Animal Cognition:

Some weeks ago one of our main studies that came out of the Seeing Voices Project was published in @SpringerANCO. To put it simple we found that young #ZebraFinches love to watch TV but they don’t learn from it! @JudithVarkevisser @scharff_scharff @WHalfwerk @HFSP 📺🐦
(1/5) https://t.co/rycGCYpJmF
— Dr. Ralph Simon (@RalSimon) October 7, 2021

 

Learned to use a nice new tool to analyze all my bat footage: DeepLabCut

Far from perfect, but I labelled only 40 frames, trained the network for 1,5h (5000 iterations) et voilà 🦇🌺amazing tool @DeepLabCut #deeplabcut #bats #batpollination #markerlessposeestimation pic.twitter.com/NOqK2DKd7d
— Dr. Ralph Simon (@RalSimon) September 16, 2020

 

 

“Proud to be coauthor of this interesting study published in Behavioral Biology and Sociobiology, where we show how a Neotropical Katydid adapts it’s vibratory signaling to variation in wind speed most likely to avoid masking of their matingsignals”

In this video you can see how we expose katydids to artificial wind and how males almost immediately start tremulating (producing vibrational signals) when the wind treatment stops. My hand in front of the camera indicates the start of the silent treatment. pic.twitter.com/sc1mHGfjqJ
— Estefania Velilla (@EstefaniaVelil1) May 4, 2020

 “Our new paper “Bioinspired sonar reflectors as guiding beacons for autonomous navigation” is out in this weeks issue of PNAS!”

Floral forms, inspired by flowers with shapes that reflect sonar and stand out acoustically to attract pollinating bats, can be used to guide #autonomousvehicles. In PNAS: https://t.co/qGaru3mOcm pic.twitter.com/uk2hkbpZlB

— PNAS (@PNASNews) January 13, 2020

 

 

“Nice news feature in Scientific American on our recent Current Biology paper, where we show how gleaning bats use leaves as specular reflectors to find hidden insects.”

 

Physics technique reveals hidden bugs to bats https://t.co/4wu8qtiVrB pic.twitter.com/uUvx12nPl5 — Scientific American (@sciam) December 6, 2019

RALPH SIMON

– BIOLOGIST –

I‘m a biologist (Ph.D.) and staff scientist at Nuremberg Zoo based in Nuremberg, Germany. I’m interested in the evolutionary, physiological and physical constraints that shape animal orientation, communication and sensory experience. Thereby, I’m not only working on a single stimuli level but aim to consider the full range of sensory channels and their interactions. Only this way is it possible to fully understand an animal’s sensory world. My approach to study these questions is to gain control over the sensory world of animals with state-of-the-art technical setups using biomimetics, robotics and virtual realities. Using this approach, I investigate bat echolocation with a focus on nectar feeding bats and the acoustic adaptations of the plants they pollinate. Apart from fundamental research in the field of sensory ecology, I also carry out research in more applied fields as bio-inspired sonar sensing and nature conservation research, specifically I worked on measures against bat fatalities at wind turbines. At the moment, I’m also involved in the ‘Seeing Voices Project’, where we try to disentangle the role of multimodal cues in vocal learning in birds by using robotic birds as song tutors.