Professor Fritz Vollrath
I am an evolutionary biologist with a long history of studying the behaviour, ecology, life history and evolution of spiders, webs and silks. My interests encompass other nano-scale biological materials as well as the generic concept of copying concepts from Nature, which includes the emergent field of soft robotics.
In addition, I am fascinated by elephants and their intelligence. As a long-term trustee of Save the Elephants, a UK charity with a research base in Kenya, I am very lucky to be ablt to study the behaviour and ecology - as well as the physiology and genetics - of those magnificent African elephants in their natural habitats
After an internship with Niko Tinbergen at the Animal Behaviour Research Group in Oxford, I returned to Germany to study Zoology, Limnology, Palaeontology and Physics in Freiburg and Göttingen. An MSc on Pigeon Navigation at Konrad Lorenz's Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen was followed by a PhD in Freiburg on Spider Behaviour, working mostly at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
I returned to Oxford on a Royal Society Post-Doc Fellowship with Richard Dawkins to explore the spider's web as an Extended Phenotype. This led to a major award of the Volkswagen Foundation to use Artificial Intelligence, as a then novel tool, to analyse the spider’s web. A move to Basel on a junior Professorship revived my interest in Evo-Devo. An appointment as Regius Professor brought me to Aarhus in Denmark where my group and I studied spider web-building and web-engineering. This work continued when I returned to Oxford some years later where the group’s research expanded to include web-silk proteins and their properties.
Many years of fieldwork in the Americas, Australia, Melanesia and Africa provided inspiration and a refocus from spider to elephant decision making. This new interest further expanded to studies of elephant ecology, physiology, behaviour and conservation by inter alia examining elephant reactions to bees, analysing the economics of elephant mobility in complex ecosystems, and evaluating the use of drones in elephant research and conservation.
Last but not least, my studies of silk protein-folding inspired a fascination with p53, a key anti-cancer protein in many vertebrates, that in elephants seems to have evolved a unique role and modus operandi more to do with the preservation of functional sperm rather than fighting cancer.
A number of Oxford spin-outs and start-ups (e.g. Newrotex and INOArmor) resulted from my spider and silk research, while the elephant studies are all closely integrated into research projects of Save the Elephants.
For a full list of Professor Vollrath's publications please see:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XIeVwI8AAAAJ&hl=en
News from Biology
Professor Fritz Vollrath
I am an evolutionary biologist with a long history of studying the behaviour, ecology, life history and evolution of spiders, webs and silks. My interests encompass other nano-scale biological materials as well as the generic concept of copying concepts from Nature, which includes the emergent field of soft robotics.
In addition, I am fascinated by elephants and their intelligence. As a long-term trustee of Save the Elephants, a UK charity with a research base in Kenya, I am very lucky to be ablt to study the behaviour and ecology - as well as the physiology and genetics - of those magnificent African elephants in their natural habitats
After an internship with Niko Tinbergen at the Animal Behaviour Research Group in Oxford, I returned to Germany to study Zoology, Limnology, Palaeontology and Physics in Freiburg and Göttingen. An MSc on Pigeon Navigation at Konrad Lorenz's Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen was followed by a PhD in Freiburg on Spider Behaviour, working mostly at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
I returned to Oxford on a Royal Society Post-Doc Fellowship with Richard Dawkins to explore the spider's web as an Extended Phenotype. This led to a major award of the Volkswagen Foundation to use Artificial Intelligence, as a then novel tool, to analyse the spider’s web. A move to Basel on a junior Professorship revived my interest in Evo-Devo. An appointment as Regius Professor brought me to Aarhus in Denmark where my group and I studied spider web-building and web-engineering. This work continued when I returned to Oxford some years later where the group’s research expanded to include web-silk proteins and their properties.
Many years of fieldwork in the Americas, Australia, Melanesia and Africa provided inspiration and a refocus from spider to elephant decision making. This new interest further expanded to studies of elephant ecology, physiology, behaviour and conservation by inter alia examining elephant reactions to bees, analysing the economics of elephant mobility in complex ecosystems, and evaluating the use of drones in elephant research and conservation.
Last but not least, my studies of silk protein-folding inspired a fascination with p53, a key anti-cancer protein in many vertebrates, that in elephants seems to have evolved a unique role and modus operandi more to do with the preservation of functional sperm rather than fighting cancer.
A number of Oxford spin-outs and start-ups (e.g. Newrotex and INOArmor) resulted from my spider and silk research, while the elephant studies are all closely integrated into research projects of Save the Elephants.
For a full list of Professor Vollrath's publications please see:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XIeVwI8AAAAJ&hl=en