Current press releases

High-ranking mothers provide their sons with a privileged upbringing and this increases their son’s success after leaving home. This was now demonstrated for the first time in a social mammal, the spotted hyena.

The world’s most endangered otter species known as the hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) has been “rediscovered” in Deramakot Forest Reserve in Sabah by a collaboration of German and Malaysian researchers.

Within five years the death toll of North American bats succumbing to “white-nose syndrome” has reached the one million threshold, now the causative fungus Geomyces destructans was identified in a number of European countries – without detrimental effects for the native bat populations.

International scientists and zoo experts started together with Malaysian governmental and conservation organisations an extensive programme to protect the Sabah rhino.

Wild horses were domesticated in the Ponto-Caspian steppe region (today Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Romania) in the 3rd millennium B.C. Despite the pivotal role horses have played in the history of human societies, the process of their domestication is not well understood. A new study unravelled the mystery about domestication of horse.

An international team of scientists now answered the question how social status is inherited in one of the most social of all mammals, the spotted hyena. The scientists used observations during the last 20 years of rare cases of adoption among hyenas in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania in combination with the latest molecular techniques to identify genetic mothers to demonstrate that hyena mothers pass on their social status by supporting their young during social interactions with other group members.

Each night, tropical fruit-eating bats ingest large amounts of secondary plant compounds with their food. This may become particularly problematic for pregnant or lactating bat mothers, since secondary plant compounds may damage the embryo or the juvenile. Now,a scientific study describes for the first time how female fruit-eating bats deal with this situation.