Friederike Hillemann

I'm a behavioural ecologist and I study FEASTs - Foraging Ecology And Social Ties. My comparative research focuses on social transmission processes, such as food sharing and using social information to find food. Specifically, I am interested in how social ties help individuals navigate their environments and buffer environmental risks. I study how social, economic, and ecological factors influence individuals’ behaviours, from where or what to forage, to decisions about whom to hang out with.

Postdoctoral research: Food production and food sharing networks in subsistence communities

In September 2024, I joined the University of Durham's Department of Psychology on a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. My cross-cultural research analyses socio-economic correlates of individual foraging decisions and harvest returns in Indigenous subsistence communities, and how cooperative food production and sharing networks buffer environmental risks and food insecurity, particularly in communities disproportionately affected by climate change. This project considers how social structures and sharing norms emerge from individual decisions, and explores drivers of heterogeneity in behaviour among community members. This project builds on my previous postdoctoral research and I work in close collabration with Elspeth Ready and Sheina Lew-Levy.
In July 2020, I joined the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture at the Leipzig-based MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology as a postdoctoral researcher. I analysed data from the Inuit community of Kangiqsujuaq in the Eastern Canadian Arctic to study traditional food production and cooperative sharing networks, and the role of socio-economic status and environmental variability on peoples' subsistence decisions and food security. This research was part of the Sanguatsiniq Project led by Elspeth Ready.

PhD research: Socio-ecological factors shaping mixed-species groups

During my DPhil at the University of Oxford, I studied how mixed-species groups are formed and maintained, linking individual behaviour to community processes. Using individually PIT-tagged songbirds in Wytham Woods near Oxford as a model system, I combined observational and experimental approaches to study social information use and collective behaviour. For example, I developed a framework that is based on concepts of optimality, and linked processes of group formation to signalling theory and information use, and compared observed pattern of individuals’ social decisions to simulated processes for hypothesis testing. I also studied consistency in individuals’ social phenotypes, to better understand how and why individuals differ in their social behaviours and network positions. Participation in mixed-species flocks is a complex balance of competition cost and grouping benefits, mediated by both individual phenotype and environmental conditions. Read more about the Wytham Tit Project and the challenges of collecting data on wild songbirds' social networks in this Audobon article.

BSc and MSc research: Animal behaviour, social cognition, and communication

During my studies of (behavioural) biology at the University of Göttingen, I established a fundamental skillset for studying animal behaviour using observational and experimental approaches. For example, I studied post-conflict behaviour and reconciliation in wild Barbary macaques in the Moroccan Middle Atlas Mountains, and vocal communication and collective territory defense in a Spanish population of cooperatively breeding Carrion crows. In-between my degree courses, I interned at the Konrad Lorenz Research Center. Together with Claudia Wascher, I tested crows’ and ravens' ability to cope with delayed gratification, which is considered an important cognitive prerequisite for cooperative behaviours. We showed that crows and ravens can forgo an immediate food reward and wait for more preferred food, which was compared to the famous Marshmallow Test in media articles, e.g., here and here.

Sustainable research: Open data and code

I am committed to integrity, transparency, and reproducibility in research. I contribute to and use long-term datasets and implement rigorous data management and analysis practices, and openly share my research data, code, and other outputs.
From February to August 2024, I worked for SPI-Birds, a network, database, and resource hub for those working on Studies of Populations of Individually-marked Birds. I've been helping to develop a GitHub-implemented peer-review process for Open, and FAIR research code. SPI-Birds is funded by the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (NIOO-KNAW).

Peer-reviewed Publications

Wascher CAF, Hillemann F. Observation of female-male mounting in the carrion crow. Behavioural Processes, 105055, doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2024.105055. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Davidson JD, de Oliveira Lopes FN, Safaei S, Hillemann F, Russell NJ and Schaare HL. 2023. Postdoctoral researchers’ perspectives on working conditions and equal opportunities in German academia. Frontiers in Psychology, 14:1217823, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1217823. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Hillemann F, Beheim BA, Ready E. 2023. Socio-economic predictors of Inuit hunting choices and their implications for climate change adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378: 20220395, doi: 110.1098/rstb.2022.0395. [PDF] [talk] [tl;dr]

Braga PHP, Hébert K, Hudgins EJ, Scott ER, Edwards BPM, Sánchez Reyes LL, Grainger M, Foroughirad V, Hillemann F, Binley A, Brookson C, Gaynor K, Sabet SS, Güncan A, Weierbach H, Gomes DGE, Crystal-Ornelas R. 2023. Not just for programmers: How GitHub can accelerate collaborative and reproducible research in ecology and evolution. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14:1364–1380, doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.14108. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Cantor M, Maldonado-Chaparro AA, Beck K, Brandl HB, Carter GG, He P, Hillemann F, Klarevas-Irby JA, Ogino M, Papageorgiou D, Prox L, Farine DR. 2021. The importance of individual-to-society feedbacks in animal ecology and evolution. Journal of Animal Ecology, 90: 27-44, doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.13336. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Hillemann F, Cole EF, Sheldon BC, Farine DR. 2020. Information use in foraging flocks of songbirds - no evidence for social transmission of patch quality. Animal Behaviour, 165: 35-41, doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.04.024. [PDF] [talk] [tl;dr]

Hillemann F, Cole EF, Keen SC, Sheldon BC, Farine DR. 2019. Diurnal variation in the production of vocal information about food supports a model of social adjustment in wild songbirds. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286: 20182740, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.2740. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Wascher CAF, Hillemann F, Canestrari D, Baglione V. 2015. Carrion crows learn to discriminate between calls of reliable and unreliable conspecifics. Animal Cognition, 18: 1181-1185, doi: 10.1007/s10071-015-0879-8. [PDF]

Hillemann F, Bugnyar T, Kotrschal K, Wascher CAF. 2014. Waiting for better, not for more: Corvids respond to quality in two delay maintenance tasks. Animal Behaviour, 90, 1-10, doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.01.007. [PDF]

Preprints

Chan AHH, Dunning J, Burke T, Chik HYJ, Dunleavy D, Evans T, Ferreira A, Fourie B, Griffith SC, Hillemann F, Schroeder J. Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions. EcoEvoRxiv, doi: 10.32942/X2P890. [PDF]

Hillemann F, Cole EF, Farine DR, Sheldon BC. Wild songbirds exhibit consistent individual differences in interspecific social behaviour. bioRxiv, doi: 10.1101/746545. [PDF] [tl;dr]

Susini I, Safryghin A, Hillemann F, Wascher CAF. Delay of gratification in non-human animals: A review of inter- and intra-specific variation in performance. bioRxiv, doi: 10.1101/2020.05.05.078659. [PDF]