Paper entitled "Rhythmic coordination in rapid duets of little crakes: cooperative signalling without shared experience" and published by Jan Jedlikowski and Paweł Ręk (from our lab) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences attracts media attention (see here). We have some of the fastest duet singers in the country.


Details in the paper:
Jedlikowski J, Ręk P(2025) Rhythmic coordination in rapid duets of little crakes: cooperative signalling without shared experience. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 292(2051):20251100. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2025.1100

As you know, the ability to focus on a longer text is becoming a thing of the past. Therefore, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Behavioural Ecology, I will give you an overview of how the scientific history of the Department has developed and what our most important achievements are in the most abbreviated way possible.

The Department was founded on the initiative of Tomasz Osiejuk and Piotr Tryjanowski, precisely on December 1, 2004, so papers with our affiliation began to appear in 2005. Undoubtedly, our good spirit then was the then Dean of the Faculty of Biology, Andrzej Lesicki, who bet on the young and the mouthy. Piotr was mainly involved in bird ecology, and at the time, he was most interested in birds of the agricultural landscape, the impact of climate change on birds. On the other hand, I worked on birds but used them mainly as a model for understanding sound communication in animals. Hence, during this first period, our first doctoral students and we studied various aspects of bird ecology and their behaviour in the context of communication or response to environmental change.

Thanks to several grants and doctoral students (Kasia Łosak, Michał Skierczyński, Paweł Ręk, Michał Budka, Paweł Szymański), we were able to describe sound communication well and test many detailed hypotheses for two model species, the song learning ortolan bunting, and the non-learners, the corncrake. One of the most significant achievements was demonstrating the conventional nature of communication in the corncrake. When Piotr left the Department to take up the position of head of the Department of Zoology at the University of Life Sciences, practically all research effort was placed on bird bioacoustics. Another novelty, initiated by Marcin Antczak, the first assistant professor at the Department, hired after his doctorate was done in České Budějovice, was the start of research in the tropics, specifically in the mountains of Cameroon.

Since 2007, we have conducted research every year, first in Cameroon (2007-17) and then in many other countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, and Mozambique. This has resulted in publications on duetting bird songs, year-round vocal activities of selected species, and ecoacoustics. Recently, many articles have dealt with various aspects of encoding identity or species affiliation in selected tropical bird species. Around the same time, another strand of research was initiated by Pawel Ręk, after defending his doctorate. While doing a postdoc in Australia, he took up the study of multimodal (audio-visual) communication, and in doing so, he used self-built biorobots. This is one of the least researched aspects of animal communication, and Pawel's work brings significant discoveries here. Michal Budka, on the other hand, has been consistently moving in the direction of ecoacoustics for some time, with projects from the boreal zone to the equatorial zone, dealing with biodiversity and competition for acoustic space. For almost 10 years, the Department has also employed Magda Herdegen-Radwan, who focuses on the evolution of behaviour, and her primary research model is the guppy. Her research deals with learning and sexual selection, as well as animal personality. The latest to join the Department's current membership is Pawel Szymanski, who has participated in three consecutive projects in Africa. As undoubtedly the most field-trained figure in the Department, he has contributed significantly to a number of our avian studies; of the most interesting ones, we can mention the paper, honoured by the editors of Ibis, on the effect of wind turbine noise on the skylark’s song, based on a natural experiment underway during the construction of a wind farm.

In summary, 13 employees have passed through the department, but the core of the team was usually 4-5 people. It was impossible to devote more space to all of them, so I focused mainly on what we found in the research streams that we continue. During these 20 years, we have promoted 17 doctoral students from Poland, the UK and France; another five (including one from Italy) are expected to complete their dissertations in 1-2 years. We have hosted over a dozen interns, primarily doctoral students, from the Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain, Slovakia, Turkey and France. We have completed over a dozen projects, funded mainly by NCN, NCBiR, and other foundations. We are unique in this part of the World focused strictly on bio- and ecoacoustics, which is reflected in the courses we teach.

What does it look like in numbers?

We published between 8 and 24 articles per year, resulting in a total of about 272 articles that were cited 5739 times. We were diverse, as we published in 123 different journals, including such top journals as Nature, Science Advances, Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences of The United States of America, Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences or Nature Ecology And Evolution, or Biology Letters. At the beginning we were focused on different aspects of behavioural ecology and ecology, we published mainly in ecological and behavioural journals as Ecological Indicators, Agriculture Ecosystems and Environment, Journal of Animal Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, and on the other hand, Animal Behaviour, Behavioural Ecology, Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, Ethology, Behaviour, Behavioural Processes etc. As we were focused mainly on birds, we published many papers in ornithological journals, almost all you may find in Clarivate or Scopus databases, including those from the top like Auk (today Ornithology), Journal of Avian Biology, Ibis, Journal of Ornithology etc. We have also published several books or chapters on bird biology, agricultural areas or selected bird species such as the charismatic white stork, as well as chapter in textbooks on bird monitoring methods or bioacoustics.

Why is it worth coming to us if you are a student? A significant part of our research involves direct work in environments where natural interactions between animals are still observed, in settings such as tropical forests, savannas, or even small biodiversity oases within the agricultural landscapes of Europe. These experiences truly allow you to feel what nature is really like.

Tomasz Osiejuk