Jutta Schneider

Prof. Dr. Jutta Schneider is a Full Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Hamburg's Department of Biology, where she leads the Behavioral Biology research unit at the Institute of Animal Cell and Systems Biology. She earned her PhD from the University of Munich (1993) and completed Habilitations at the Universities of Mainz (2001) and Bonn (2003). Her career includes postdoctoral research across four continents and a DFG Heisenberg Fellowship (2001–2004).

Her research explores evolutionary dynamics in arthropods, specializing in:

• Sexual selection, conflict, and mating systems
• Cooperative behavior in social spiders
• Adaptive plasticity in life-history traits
• Cognition costs and urban adaptation in spiders

She maintains an active spider breeding laboratory for experimental studies.

Recent publications (2022–2024) cluster around spider behavioral ecology, with emphases on:

• Pheromone signaling and sexual cannibalism
• Kin-based cooperation and social foraging
• Morphological adaptations and hybridization
• Acrobatic predation and niche engineering

Notable professional activities include serving as Editor-in-Chief of Ethology (2010–2020), DFG Review Board membership (2020–2028), and leadership as Head of the Department of Biology (2014–2017). She currently supervises multiple third-party funded projects including studies on sexual conflict in mantises and genomic adaptations in widow spiders.