Max Körner

Almost back home from the fantastic ecological immunity workshop. Good times, super grateful to Sophie, Jens et al for organizing - already looking forward to the next one! So much fun and science and good conversations in just a few days. Cheers guys!

Very proud and happy with @leo-theo.bsky.social and his poster presentation at the Ecological Immunity Workshop 2025 :) Excellent work Leon!

The EAE group really enjoyed #DZG2025 in Berlin — great talks, inspiring discussions, and lots of fun!

Was so nice to present our research and @unibayreuth.bsky.social at this DZG meeting! Glad to be talking about parental care and how it interacts with offspring immunity 🎉
Expect our upcoming paper that deals with this cool topic!🪲 @max-evolbio.bsky.social and I had a blast working on it
#DZG2025

Kinship as a double-edged sword: relatedness among burying beetle larvae enhances growth but increases mortality | Biology Letters Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that relatedness can have complex effects on social life. While high relatedness may promote sibling cooperation and altruism through indirect fitness ...

New study on the effect of relatedness on larval cooperation in burying beetles: sibs boost growth, strangers boost survival. doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...
Congrats to Paul Huber and Daniel Wittmann!

Good times! :)

Read the current issue of @jevbio.bsky.social here: academic.oup.com/jeb/issue

📸 Heiko Bellmann
Adult #Nicrophorus vespilloides #beetle in the act of feeding its
offspring atop a vertebrate carcass the beetles have monopolised.

... And it's off to the second conference in a row, this time at the Werbellinsee! Really looking forward to lots of immunity at the EIW 2025! Big thanks to Sophie Armitage, Jens Rolff, and everyone else organizing!

AI Abuse to Skirt Copyright Law - Macro Photography by Nicky Bay In the past week, a number of prominent nature photographers showed how their photographs were being stolen and mangled into "AI-nonsense", deceiving countless others into believing the made-up storie...

www.nickybay.com/ai-abuse-to-...
AI abuse on macrophotography and AI generation of incorrect captions. Here are examples compiled by wildlife photographer Nicky Bay.

Not usually into biomechanics but this was one of my favorite talks this #DZG2025 ! Great stuff - e.g. @wolffspider.bsky.social demonstrating how silk can be more flexible and stronger at the same time in certain configurations.

Amazing talk by Daniela @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social on spider sleep and possible adaptive values of rem sleep stages. Never knew spiders have sleep phases that eerily look like dream states. Traumhaft!! I wonder how many other creatures feature this behavior... Or how many don't!

Great start to day 2 of #DZG2025 with babbling bats and Mirjam Knörnschild of @mfnberlin.bsky.social!

And #DZG2025 is officially open!

Great opening event at the @mfnberlin.bsky.social - what a stunning venue! We are looking forward to a great conference!

Great session & great talks! Thanks for bearing with me while going slightly over.

Excellent talk Leon 👏

See you in a jiffy :)

After many attempts to get Beauveria fungi to actually harm and infect Nicrophorus beetles in order to test the beetle's social immunity mettle against such a threat we found that I was probably barking up the wrong tree. Check out Leon's paper to find out why!

Surviving in the fast lane: no increased mortality, but faster growth for pathogen-exposed larvae of a family-living beetle Abstract. Animal taxa exhibiting post-hatching care can be found throughout the animal kingdom. During this period, parents aggregate with their offspring

Through social immunity burying beetles protect their kids from diseases on their carcass. Can this protection ward off an insect pathogen? Researchers @steigerlab.bsky.social find out!

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

@leo-theo.bsky.social @max-evolbio.bsky.social

🔬 Last week at the BayCEER Colloquium, Dr. Maximilian Körner gave us a fascinating glimpse into the social lives of Nicrophorus #beetles 🪲

A fascinating and insightful talk that sparked great discussions!
@max-evolbio.bsky.social

Are you ready for the next talk?🌿

#SocialEvolution #Ecology

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

Chores of a tropical worker bee: drinking excess condensation water inside the hive, then spitting it out at the hive entrance 💦 🐝

Water & sun at MEM25 lunch break ☕

Excellent first day (and finish) at MEM25 :) with @drdomain.bsky.social and @joskramer.bsky.social & @kathrinaotte

Love the Mug!

Here goes the 3rd Münster Evolution Meeting, finally made it here - third time's the charm!

There's a lot more of these on Joël's page, and even though I have no longer the pleasure of working with these animals to answer questions of family life and its evolution, I can still highly recommend checking them out!!