Professor Dr Bert Hölldobler

Research Priorities: Behavioural physiology, evolutionary biology, sociobiology, chemical ecology, biology of social insects
Bert Hölldobler is a German-American ethologist who works in the field of experimental behavioural physiology and sociobiology. His research mainly focuses on social insects, the diversity of their social organisations and their communication strategies. He became known beyond expert circles for his work on the behaviour of ants.
In his research, he describes the differences between the social organisations of social insects and explores the diverse behavioural mechanisms that underlie communication and division of labour systems. In addition to establishing numerous chemical messengers (pheromones) which ants use as communication signals, he also investigated the exocrine glands in ants that produce these pheromones. Furthermore, he was able to demonstrate that often chemical signals are combined with mechanical signals (tactile communication and vibration detection). Tactile communication mostly takes the form of modulating signals in the communication process. Together with his team, Bert Hölldobler was able to decode the mechanisms of how ants regulate the reproductive division of labour in ant colonies. They were also able to collect new empirical data explaining the evolutionary transition from “primitive” hierarchical organisations to egalitarian networks and superorganism organisations.
In addition to communication among ants, Hölldobler also conducts research on ant colonies as ecological islands. He is interested in the interaction of different organisms in a colony. In this connection, he established how other insects or bacteria live in symbiosis with ants, often as parasites. A keen research interest of Hölldobler is the interaction of host and symbiont as well as the signals they use in this symbiosis.
Next to his many scientific publications, Bert Hölldobler has also mastered communication with the general readership. He was honoured on numerous occasions for his nonfiction books on the life of ants in the USA and in Germany, repeatedly landing on bestseller lists. In 1991, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Ants”, which he co-authored with Edward O. Wilson. Moreover, seven ant species are named after him.