Your Title, Name, Place of work?
Dr Madlen Stange, Bonn

What is your current position/function at our institute?
Junior Research Group Leader, zmb (Centre for Molecular Biodiversity Research) and ztm (Centre for Taxonomy and Morphology)

What do you like about your job/position?
I appreciate the freedom that this job choice offers, from traveling to exotic places, experiencing different cultures and meeting so many different people. The freedom, however, is just a superficial one, as obviously one is not free to study whatever we like. We have to adhere to funding schemes and political goals, mostly for a good reason. Lifelong learning, creating and disseminating knowledge is what I love most about my job, to make a new generation aware of the challenges ahead of us and the solutions we already have.

Can you please describe your tasks at the LIB?
Currently, my group is monitoring Phoxinus phoxinus, an ecologically important schooling fish, and hybridisations of the native with non-native, yet closely related, species. To do so, we monitor local fish populations by capturing, identifying, and counting fishes during so-called field campaigns. We infer their ecological niche by means of stomach content analyses, stable isotope analyses, and habitat characterizations. We look at their morphological differences applying statistical shape analyses and investigate their genetic level of differentiation. All this we do to ultimately understand mechanisms and impact of hybridisation-invasions.

Keyword
Evolutionary biology

Is there something about the Institute that particularly appeals to you?
The institute has the potential to be a powerhouse for integrative biodiversity research. It combines biodiversity monitoring, molecular biodiversity research, taxonomy (an underacknowledged indispensable research area) and morphology as well as the science transfer to the public. Rarely are all those areas combined under one roof.

 

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