News

28th November  2022:  Our manuscript on the development and application of a robotic zebra finch was just accepted at Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Stay tuned for the paper and all the open source stuff we a publishing along with it!

Bat-plant interactions rule! Check out our new study on traits of bat-pollinated flowers in PLOS Computational Biology:

Glad to share our new paper on the #SoundOfFlowers in @PLOSCompBiol. In a joint project with @mclduk @bananabcarlito @MKnornschild & @JaSteckel we collected more than 30k recs of flowers & found that bat flowers show a row of special acoustic traits. https://t.co/V2XDLx7Oty
(1/5) pic.twitter.com/x6p8SyZNUN
— Dr. Ralph Simon (@RalSimon) December 23, 2021

 

Check out our new study on scalable microphone arrays in Communications Biology:

Check out our latest paper on the development of large scale microphone arrays and their application to study the behavior of bats and birds @EVerreycken @JaSteckel @CoSysLab @BarberLab 🦇🐦🎙️ https://t.co/uf51FlfuWF
(1/5) pic.twitter.com/jLxRXOCs8C
— Dr. Ralph Simon (@RalSimon) November 23, 2021

 

 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

 

 

Our PNAS paper on bioinspired sonar reflectors was featured by Discover Magazine

Nice article in @DiscoverMag on our bioinspired reflector paper, published earlier this year with @JaSteckel in @PNASNews. You'll find background information & nice insights from @YovelBatLab. Thank you so much @RaleighMcElvery! 🦇🌺🤖https://t.co/9rl0CJOQCf
— Dr. Ralph Simon (@RalSimon) November 16, 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.), permanent staff scientist at Nuremberg Zoo (Germany), Research Group Leader of the Behavioral Ecology and Conservation Lab and research associate at CoSys-Lab, Antwerp University (Belgium). 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.